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The First Track of Footprints
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Description
This work records an event during the late 1950s when ten million soldiers were sent to the Great Northern Wilderness in northeast China to become agricultural workers; Chao Mei was one of them. The print presents the soldiers’ first experience of the wasteland in extremely harsh conditions. Chao is regarded as one of the key founders and the most influential figure in the Great Northern Wilderness School.
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Details
- Associated place
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Asia › China › Heilongjiang province (subject)
- Date
- 1960
- Artist/maker
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Chao Mei (born 1931) (printmaker)
- Material and technique
- multi-block woodcut, printed with oil-based ink
- Dimensions
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mount 68.6 x 50.8 cm (height x width)
sheet 41 x 48 cm (height x width)
print 30.4 x 36.2 cm (height x width)
- Material index
- Technique index
- Object type index
- No. of items
- 1
- Credit line
- Purchased, 2007.
- Accession no.
- EA2007.9
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Further reading
Weimin He, and Shelagh Vainker, Chinese Prints 1950-2006 in the Ashmolean Museum (Oxford: Ashmolean Museum, 2007), no. 33 on p. 41, p. 53, illus. p. 41
Past Exhibition
see (1)
Location
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- currently in research collection
Objects are sometimes moved to a different location. Our object location data is usually updated on a monthly basis. Contact the Jameel Study Centre if you are planning to visit the museum to see a particular object on display, or would like to arrange an appointment to see an object in our reserve collections.
Publications online
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Chinese Prints 1950-2006 in the Ashmolean Museum
The eternity of art is based on the perfect unity between its form and content.
Chao is regarded as one of the key founders and the most influential figure of the Great Northern Wilderness School, which was initiated in Heilongjiang province in the late 1950s by a cultural section of the army. As an agricultural worker and later an editor and printmaker for The Beidahuang Pictorial, Chao has used non-key block techniques with dense and rich colours to depict the vigorous beauty of the northern land. His style has changed over the years from realism showing the influence of Soviet socialism, to romanticism, with Chinese calligraphic inspiration, to semi-abstraction and simplicity. He has been Director of the Chinese Artists’ Association and Chairman of the Heilongjiang Artists’ Association. Two galleries have been founded in his name, in Harbin and in his hometown, Heze.
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