Workshop reportA Cross-Cultural Approach to Woodblock Printing

24 June 2024

Photo: Marco Heiles

A pervasive phenomenon across many manuscript cultures, examples of woodblock printing can be found from the seventh to the twentieth century. A workshop at the CSMC addressed different traditions of woodblock printing from East to West, technical aspects, and theoretical considerations.

The technique of woodblock printing, which can be used to mass-produce texts and images, is and has been part of many manuscript cultures around the world. Woodblock printing is a relief printing technique. To make woodblocks, knives are used to remove the areas not to be printed from the surface of a smoothly planed block of wood. The raised areas are then coloured and rubbed or pressed. The earliest surviving examples were found in China and are dated to the late seventh century. The technique soon spread to other regions of East and Central Asia and was used for both ephemeral and literary texts such as Buddhist sutras or the Confucian canon. In Latin Europe, woodblock printmaking was established in the early 15th century for woodcuts on paper, both for the production of individual sheets and for the printing of entire books (block-books). At the same time, woodblock imprints were integrated in various ways into manuscripts and moveable-type books and have been in use until the end of the twentieth century. Although the basic principle of woodblock printing was always the same, its application in different cultures differed in many technical details, but also in its social function and the social status of its producers.

The workshop ‘Woodblock Printing. A Cross-Cultural Approach’ on 22–23 April 2024 aimed to bring together experts on the different cultures using woodblock printing at the Cluster of Excellence ‘Understanding Written Artefacts’ and was organised by an interdisciplinary team consisting of Michael Friedrich (Sinology), Arianna D’Ottone Rambach (Arabic Studies), and Marco Heiles (German Studies).

The first presentations of the workshop were dedicated to the different traditions of woodblock printing from East to West: Korea, Vietnam, Mongolia, the Arabic-speaking world, and Latin Europe. The focus then shifted to the technical aspects of woodblock printmaking: inks and printing techniques, multicolour printing methods, special tools such as the Chinese printing table, and the integration of woodblocks into the typographic book. The final part was devoted to theoretical considerations, including the influence of cataloguing and conservation practices on the study of Arabic woodblock printing, the role of block printing in Chinese manuscript culture, and the influence of manuscript aesthetics on woodblock prints in Early Modern Japan.

The highlight and final event of the workshop was a practical demonstration of Chinese woodblock printing, which was also attended by students from the printing workshop at the Hamburg University of Applied Sciences. Here, the workshop participants had the opportunity to produce woodblock prints themselves.

The workshop programme with abstracts of all contributions can be found here.