Word: prints
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Printmakers are often embarrassed by prints in general - by print posters available online, or the canvas prints that design shops stock by the dozen. Tawdry works like these have brought Matisse or Warhol to countless college dorms and dental clinics, but their low cost and ubiquity means that printmaking is often seen as the art-world equivalent of a takeaway cheeseburger: cheap and insubstantial...
...Asian printmakers - with leading artists among them - are in the vanguard of rehabilitating the craft. Their base is a renovated former godown in Singapore: the seven-year-old Singapore Tyler Print Institute (STPI). It runs a course for artists in fine-art printmaking, and then sells their work to increasingly enthusiastic collectors, who during cash-strapped times are looking for quality alternatives to overpriced canvases. "We're an amphibian," says Emi Eu, the STPI's director. "We're a gallery and a learning institution at the same time." (Read "Painter Laureate...
...starting point of the Asian print renaissance is a sunlit studio perched above the sluggish Singapore River. There, resident artists sketch or paint their works. When they're done, they descend to the movement's operations room, a cement-floored space sealed to all natural light. It is dominated by machinery once owned by the hugely influential though now retired American printer after whom the institute is named: Kenneth Tyler, a man who consistently pushed the boundaries of printmaking from the 1960s onward, working with such artistic luminaries as Frank Stella and David Hockney. "All the machines can be pretty...
...ability of printmaking to augment the depth of original paintings or sketches is the reason artists persist with the techniques. The new print exhibition of Indonesian pop artist Agus Suwage, running at the STPI from Sept. 26 to Oct. 24, is a case in point. Agus began his residency at the Tyler Institute in January with a desire to protest a 2008 Indonesian antipornography law that he felt curbed the freedom of women and artists like himself. "It affects pluralism and Indonesia needs to be pluralistic," he says...
...bear the marks of this dissent. One depicts a naked woman against slate-gray letters - the text of the antiporn law - embossed onto paper that is often kneaded by hand from raw cotton. The physicality of Agus' finished piece, with letters extruding from crenellated surfaces, is one way his print works are unique. The use of repetition is also striking. Suwage is already well known for political commentary. With printing, his barbs have even greater sting. "The message becomes much stronger than on a single canvas work," says Tan Boon Hui, director of the Singapore Art Museum, "because there...