The ‘last master of Beijing’s woodcut New Year prints’ continues creating traditional works in a social media age
Zhang Kuo, 58, forever associates his art with Chairman Mao Zedong. In the 1970s, when he was a middle school student, houses and streets in Beijing were posted with woodcut prints of the “great helmsman” during Spring Festival.
He was fascinated by the traditional folk art, but dared not try at that time, because any mistake on the Chairman Mao portrait could incur “anti-revolutionary” accusations.
Forty years later, he is now known as “the last master of Beijing’s woodcut New Year prints”.
The art — nianhua — dates back more than 600 years to when people put woodcut prints on doors and walls, and the gates of palaces, to ward off devils or express good wishes in traditional festivals.
Subjects varied from place to place, but Beijing natives preferred pictures of gods, heroes, ancestors, folk tales and Peking operas.
Zhang’s family lived in a hutong alley near the Forbidden City. He learned carpentry, including woodcutting, from a neighbor at a young age, before being employed as a truck driver on road construction projects.
In 2007, he traveled to Shaanxi and Henan provinces, where he found local woodcut print artists still thriving. Zhang was inspired, and determined to return to the craft.
He bought wood and spent months in libraries and antique shops, seeking traditional prints, books, and carving knives. He rented a small house as his studio in a hutong in downtown Beijing.
Woodcut printing has four steps. He usually sketches a picture on a piece of paper before carving it on a set of boards. He paints the boards in different colors. Lastly, he presses a piece of paper to the board to print the picture. In bygone days, the steps were sometimes done by different craftsmen, nianhua