Class name: “Japanese Book Art and Printing”
Taught by: Visiting Assistant Professor of East Asian Languages and Cultures
Says Huang about her class:
In this class, we look at Japanese book art, from early illustrated scrolls to contemporary artists’ books, and explore a range of printmaking and book-making processes, such as wood grain printing and katazome (paste-resist dyeing). Through both discussions and hands-on exercises, we try to understand questions such as: What happens when we pay attention to how books are made and how readers physically engage with the books? How do we think about books and printing beyond traditional emphasis on replication and transmission? What might different printing techniques teach us about our own perceptual and interpretive processes?
Huang on why she wanted to teach this class:
I have always been interested in the relationship between printing and community, as well as how material books can make reading and other creative processes visible to us. The intellectual community of a classroom is a wonderful place to think together about questions like: How can a surface simultaneously split and connect communities? How can a page hover between a record of past performance and a script to be performed in the present?
I am also excited to include a session on creative prints by Japanese women artists, inspired by my visit to the exhibition A Sign of Things to Come: Prints by Japanese Women Artists after 1950 at the Art Institute of Chicago. During this session, we discuss how these artists make use of the materiality of the printing processes, and how they negotiate with the possibilities and challenges of being a woman artist.
Huang on what makes this class unique:
This class includes visits to the special collections at Haverford College and Bryn Mawr. Through physically engaging with materials, we think about material traces of past readers in books like fingerprints, the effects of wood grain patterns in Japanese woodblock prints, and how paper texture can participate in the construction of national and colonial identities in chirimen-bon (crepe paper books).
In addition, we spend time not only discussing and observing but also writing and creating together. Each class session is paired with a hands-on exercise that introduces a printmaking or bookmaking technique. Through them, students learn to tinker and troubleshoot as a maker and experience making itself as a process of experimental thinking.