97-Year-old Printmaker Passes Away

On the morning of June 7， 2010 I received a letter from a funeral committee jointly sponsored by Shanghai People’s Arts Publishing House and Shanghai Artists Association. I was notified that Yang Keyang passed away on May 31， 2010 in Shanghai. What was inside was an obituary. My heart sank. Just in early April， I had received a letter from Yang. Inside the letter were 25 New Year cards， all printed with his creations.

Yang Keyang’s death meant that all the members of the Daoli Woodcut Research Society founded in 1936 are gone. He was the last artist of this celebrated artist group. Woodcut was something new in the 20th century in China. In 1931， Lu Xun organized a group of young printmakers into “Woodcut Forum”. The founding of the forum by Lu Xun is now widely recognized as the beginning of printmaking as a modern art in the oriental country. The Daoli Society came into being in 1936 and Yang Keyang is one of China’s first generation of woodcut artists.

Yang Keyang was a native of Suichang， a county in southern Zhejiang Province. Though administratively Suichang is part of Lishui District， the county has closer geographic ties with Quzhou， a political and economic center in southern Zhejiang. During the China’s War of Resistance against Japanese Aggression (1937-1945)， Yang created quite a few woodcarvings which portrayed the Chinese military’s fight against the invading Japanese soldiers and the hard life of the people in the occupied areas. After the war， Yang and his fellow printmakers across the country held an exhibition of prints created over the past eight years featuring the Chinese life in the war. An album was later published. Yang Keyang was elected an executive director of China National Woodcut Association.

In the 1940s， Yang Keyang firmly established himself as an accomplished woodcut artist. After the liberation of Shanghai in 1949， he worked as an art editor at East China Pictorial， a publication previously edited and published in the liberated areas. It later became East China People’s Art Publishing House and then Shanghai People’s Art Publishing House. Yang Keyang worked there for 40 years， serving as its deputy editor-in-chief for years. Also during this period of time， he served as deputy chairman of China Printmakers Association， vice chairman of Shanghai Artists Association， and chairman of Shanghai Printmakers Association.

In 1991 Yang Keyang was awarded China New Printmaking Outstanding Award and from 1992 on he received a monthly special government subsidy. Collections of his various works were published. In 2003， Shanghai People’s Art Publishing House printed a commemoration album in celebration of the 90th anniversary of Yang’s birthday.

In early autumn of 2007， he published a collection of 60 essays written over a period from 1948 to April 2007. Most of his essays are short and many are as sharp as his carving knives. In one essay written in June 1995， he sharply criticized the media for poeticizing a tobacco-themed art publication launched just a few days after May 31 World’s No Tobacco Day. In another essay Yang Keyang discusses the famous observation that time is money and analyzes the difference between a similar ancient Chinese saying and this modern-day maxim.□