Block Printing Research Articles

A Study on the Functions and Reassigning the Number of Wooden Printing Blocks of the Tripitaka Koreana Stored in Haeinsa

A Study on the Functions and Reassigning the Number of Wooden Printing Blocks of the Tripitaka Koreana Stored in Haeinsa

Russian Folk Art

Russian Folk Art. By Alison Hilton. ( Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011. Pp. xiii + 356, glossary, notes, bibliography, index, photographs.)Alison Hilton's Russian Folk Art is a re-issue of her earlier work. It includes a new preface, but this new edition lacks the striking color pictures of the first edition published in 1995. The book is comprised of 18 chapters divided into 4 sections: (1) The Arts in Peasant Life, (2) Materials and Forms, (3) Designs and Their Meanings, (4) Preservation and Revival of Russian Folk Art. Hilton's monograph opens with a consideration of the role of folk within the context of Russian towns and villages, followed by an examination of the relationships between styles and the physical characteristics of folk art (p. xvii). The author then examines the significance of the images used in the in various contexts and historical periods. She completes her study with a discussion of the folk revival and preservation movements in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Due to Soviet-era limitations on foreign researchers, she was prevented from participating in fieldwork. Consequently, her research is based on museum collections and on the scholarship of and discussions with (Soviet) Russian scholars of folk and material culture since the 1980s.Hilton begins with an overview of the nature of folk art. She emphasizes the importance of, in the words of Arkhip Ershov, a maker of distaffs from Semenovo, the thread of tradition (p. 4). This section introduces the reader to the complexity of folk in the Russian context, laying out the dilemmas for its study: the intersection of village and urban (including church and court as well as the craft trade) ; its interaction with historical events; and the origins of its motifs and techniques, whether Slavic or borrowed from other cultures present on the Russian territory. This section includes an overview of village life, house design and decoration, and toolmaking, including a thorough discussion of the decoration. It also includes a chapter on regional folk specialization and particularly renowned folk artists. Hilton focuses on two artists, a distaff maker and a birch-bark carver, to demonstrate the continual process of give and take between local customs and external influences (p. 56). The second section expands on these topics through a detailed study of the motifs and styles of, in turn, wood carving, painting on wood, textile arts and costume, urban folk art, and specialized crafts associated with particular regions, such as bone carving, metalworking, lubki (block printing on paper for a mass audience using folk motifs), lacquer, pottery, and toys. As an historian, she is particularly astute at outlining the visual and aesthetic characteristics of the folk arts and at making parallels between different folk traditions. For example, she examines how carving is related to textile art, and she studies how special designs on ritual breads are also connected to similar patterns in carving and embroidery. This section also outlines the effect of mass production and industrialization on folk art, in particular, on textiles as well as on wood carving, since the tools required to spin and weave have become obsolete. …

Adaptation ofWarli art for the development of blocks for printing of apparels

India had always been known as the land that portrayed cultural and traditional vibrancy through its conventional arts and crafts. Every region in India has its own style and pattern of art, which is generally known as folk art. Perhaps the best-known genre of Indian folk paintings is the Warli painting from Maharashtra state. Traditionally Warli paintings were done by hand which is tedious, time consuming and laborious process. But due course of time with easy availability of different styles of printing, these paintings can be brought down on cloth by using various printing techniques. Hence, in the present study an attempt was made to develop blocks of Warli paintings of Maharashtra for printing of apparels and handicraft items. Total thirty designs were developed with the help of computer software Adobe Photoshop and Corel Draw, ten each for apparels including kurties, suits and sarees. All the developed designs were subjected to visual evaluation for selection of two best designs from each category by the panel of thirty judges. The selected designs were applied on apparels using block printing technique. The cost of each article was calculated on the basis of expenditure on raw materials, labour charges, finishing charges and profit margin. Among the apparel items, brick red and black colour printed kurti (K9), green and purple colour painted suit (D7) and purple colour printed saree (S6) were highly appreciated and accepted. However, all the other products were also appreciated. Selling price of apparel items was ranged between Rs. 492/- to Rs. 1163/-. The adaptation of Warli motifs on apparels using block printing has paved the way for the plethora of product diversification that could lead to a flourishing market.

A Backward Glance over Some Leading Citizens in the Poe World

Having grown up, academically speaking, in the shadow of Arthur Hobson Quinn, who lived roughly half an hour from my college, Ursinus, and with so many of my college teachers having studied their American literature at the University of Pennsylvania, where Quinn was supreme when American literature was still a fairly new subject in university instruction, and now with myself looking like I might well be a contemporary of Quinn, or even Poe and John Greenleaf Whittier, and being from a family in which genealogy was important, it may be natural that I should represent historical memory and share my recollections of some persons who pioneered in and opened up Poe studies. Some may be surprised to learn that Professor Quinn was, first and foremost, not a Poe specialist, but that his preeminent scholarly love was American drama. For pre-twentieth-century American plays, Quinn’s studies typically remain, after nearly a century, almost the only informed commentaries. Many have become increasingly aware that William Dunlap, America’s first major playwright, and the novelist Charles Brockden Brown, might each properly be deemed the Adam to American literary Gothicism. To return to Professor Quinn: when I began my own academic studies, he was in his eighties, ill, and housebound. He spent most of his time nestled in a chair, swathed in blankets and quilts, and wearing a sun shade, claiming that reading so many early American plays had ruined his eyesight. Before such ills befell him, Quinn was active in having established the Clothier Collection of American Drama at the University of Pennsylvania, which remains one of the foremost collections of early American plays. The Poe interest emerged from Quinn’s own work in American drama—Poe’s parents being actors—and from his aim to furnish an accurate biographical portraiture of Poe which would demolish the long-standing depiction by Rufus Griswold. Spending more than twenty years in preparing that biography, which appeared first in 1941 but has stood the test of time well enough to go through several reprintings, Quinn achieved a solid narrative account, though many of his critical opinions have been modified or superseded in the work of others. A Quinn student, J. Albert Robbins, followed his mentor’s practices in determining to present factually accurate scholarship, as some early volumes in the American Literary Scholarship journal attest. Robbins often recounted to me anecdotes of his days as Quinn’s student. Those who know Quinn primarily for

Writing witch-hunt histories: challenging the paradigm

Writing witch-hunt histories: challenging the paradigm

Representing Workers, the Workers Represented

Using a post-revisionist framework, this article considers the engagement of unions and leftist artists in the two decades after the Mexican Revolution by exploring the organizational attempts of both in relation to artistic representations of the working class. The divergent visions of radical and reformist workers of the 1920s are explored respectively by contrasting the class-based and internationalist wood block prints of David Alfaro Siqueiros and Xavier Guerrero in the proto-communist journal El Machete with the nationalist, art nouveau images in the Revista CROM, published by the dominant, officialist labour confederation. These distinct traditions converged in the 1930s, under the Communist Party concept of the ‘Popular Front’ that helped unify artists and workers behind the progressive nationalist project of President Lázaro Cardenas, a pattern exemplified by the Mexican Electricians Union (Sindicato Mexicano de Electricistas, SME), the Confederation of Mexican Workers (Confederación de Trabajadores de México, CTM) and the images of workers in the Revista Lux and by artists such as Santos Balmori of the League of Revolutionary Artists and Writers (Liga de Escritores y Artistas Revolucionarios, LEAR).

Reflections on the development of medical informatics.

The recording of numbers appears to pre-date the emergence of writing and excavations of the clay tablets of civilisations in the Middle East have shown that clay tablets were used to keep account of activities undertaken in a systematic fashion. Correspondingly, various forms of abacus have been used types of calculation from the Sumerian abacus dating from about 4 ½ thousand years ago to the Chinese abacus (Suanpan) from around 2 thousand years ago. As time passed various forms of writing were developed using animal hides, which were developed as vellum and papyrus which eventually developed into paper. Wood block printing, also, was a very ancient art and movable type printing had been utilised in the far East but the development of movable type page setting in Europe transformed the process of printing.

Avoidance of feudal taboo on emperors' names in perused versions of Yi jin jing (Classic of Changing Tendon) and the time of its transcription and blockprinting

By studying the avoidance of feudal taboo on emperors' names in the perusal of 48 extant versions of Yi jin jing (Classic of Changing Tendon), together with their contents, it is found that these versions are of valuable editions and 15 of them can be viewed as the early representative works of Yi jin jing, including 8 hand copied versions, and 7 blockprinted versions. No version of the Ming Dynasty can be found. The earliest versions are all transcribed ones, while the earliest extant blockprinted version appeared until the Daoguang reign of the Qing Dynasty. The preface of Shen's checked version doesn't avoid the emperor's name, saying that it was written in the "xin chou" year of Shunzhi, hence, it should be copied in the early Kangxi reign, and is the earliest hand copied version. The hand copied version of Yongzheng reign avoids the word "xuan", yet doesn't avoid the word "hong", also with a preface written in Yongzheng reign, indicating that this one is the earliest next to the previous one. Since the Xidi version avoids both the words "xuan" and "hong", it should be copied during or after the Qianlong reign. The earliest extant blockprinted edition is the one checked and printed by Fu Jin-quan in the third year of Daoguang which might also be the earliest blockprinted edition. That collection by Zhu Wenlan and Laizhangshi might be all later editions.

Research on blockprinted versions of Yokucho collected at the libraries in mainland China

There are several blockprinted versions of Yokucho written by Yoshimasu Todo, a representative of the Koho School, spread into inland China. By comparison, it is found that all these versions use the printing blocks of "Borotei's collected blocks". The descriptions for all these versions reveal as follows: Anhui Provincial Library: the 5(th) year of Yisi (1785) of Japanese Tenmei reign, a blockprinted edition of Langkha Bookstore, Yoshidashokento from the Borotei blocks; National Library: the 5(th) year of Yisi (1785) of Japanese Teimei reign, a blockprinted edition of Hei'an Bookstore (Royal Bookstore), Siwento Bookstore from the Borotei blocks; Library of China Academy of Chinese Medical Sciences: the 9(th) year of Renshen (1812) of Japanese Bunkha reign, a blockprinted edition of Kyoto Bookstore, Langkha Bookstore, Yoshidashoken Bookstore from the Borotei blocks; Library of Aademia Sinica: (1) the 9(th) year of Renshen (1812) of Japanese Bunkha reign, Khaga-wo Bookstore, Langkha Bookstore from the Borotei blocks; (2) the 5(th) year of Yisi (1785) of Japanese Tenmei reign, a blockprinted edition of Hei'an Bookstore (Royal Bookstore), Siwento Bookstore from the Borotei blocks; Library of Life Sciences, Shanghai Information Center for Life Sciences, Chinese Academy of Sciences: the 9(th) year of Renshen (1812) of Japanese Bunkha reign, a blockprinted edition of Kyoto Bookstore, Langkha Bookstore, Yoshidashoken Bookstore Borotei blocks.

Craft and Small Scale Production in the Global Economy: Gujarat and Kachchh in the Eighteenth and Twenty-first Centuries

India's production of fine luxury and craft goods for world markets was discovered and exploited by Europeans in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Textile producers in Gujarat, the Coromandel Coast, and Bengal applied fine craft skills to European designs, colour codes, and textile lengths and widths. Through the intervention of the East India Companies and private traders as well as their intermediaries, brokers and local merchants, weavers, and printers produced the goods to satisfy Western markets just as they had done for Eastern and African markets in the centuries before.Today Indian craftspeople are engaging in a new phase of production for global markets. They are using traditional techniques of the kind that attracted Western buyers in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries: hand weaving, hand block printing, and natural dyes. Accessing the niche national and international markets needed to provide a future for these crafts is a major challenge. This article focuses on the artisans, skills and markets in one area of India—the region of Kachchh in northern Gujarat, even now considered a remote part of the new global India. It sets this within a wider context of Gujarat and the earlier and more recent history of its textile industries. Douglas Haynes's recent book, Small Town Capitalism in Western India (2012) provides a framework for the study of small-scale industry, and the article will address his subject and methods. The new sources used are a collection of oral histories of craftspeople in a range of industries. These oral histories address skills and training across generations, and how these crafts have adapted and continue to adapt to the demands of national and world markets.

Digital Archiving Printing Blocks and Establishing Woodblock Bibliography

A great number of printed books were published in Japan after the establishment of commercial publishing in the Edo period (1603–1867). Even though it is well-known that most of the books were printed by means of woodblocks, these printing blocks have not been studied in detail because they are difficult to access and physically handle. However, digitization of the printing blocks revolutionizes research and also facilitates information sharing. This article will present a new method of digitizing printing blocks and archiving them in an online image database. The article will also draw attention to what kind of information we can retrieve from the blocks, especially circumstances of publishing that conventional bibliographies based on the printed books cannot reveal.

Consideration on Orality and Genre Traits of Pansori Novel -Focusing on Seoul Block Print 'Chunhyangjeon'-

Consideration on Orality and Genre Traits of Pansori Novel -Focusing on Seoul Block Print 'Chunhyangjeon'-

Royal Ancestor Worship and Buddhist Politics: The Hyŏnhwa-sa Stele and the Origins of the First Koryŏ Tripitaka

Abstract There is a general consensus in research on the First Koryŏ Tripitaka (aka Ch’ojo taejanggyŏng) that it began in 1011 in fulfillment of a vow: King Hyŏnjong had sworn to undertake the project if the Khitan invasion force would withdraw. The only scholar who has challenged this view is Ikeuchi Hiroshi, who claimed that the First Koryŏ Tripitaka was carved to pray for the repose of King Hyŏnjong’s parents’ souls. Ikeuchi based his arguments on a reading of the Hyŏnhwa-sa stele, erected by King Hyŏnjong as a memorial temple to his parents. This article reexamines Ikeuchi’s thesis and shows that though it is based on a mistaken reading and a colonial agenda, it is still the only research that offers some perspectives that allow us to move beyond single cause theories. His paper is a useful starting point to examine all of the different possible causes and motives that lay behind the project of carving the entire Buddhist canon on wooden printing blocks. Irrespective of whether or not the wish to repel the invaders was the primary cause, this article shows that there were many deeper motivations and contributing factors that irrevocably pushed Hyŏnjong to undertake this project. One of the more important contributing factors, it is argued, was the rebuilding of his legitimacy through a reassertion of the privileged relation the ruling Wang Dynasty enjoyed with Buddhism.

Role of Traditional Textile Hand Prints of Barmer in Employment Generation

India has a long tradition of textile especially hand woven and hand spun textiles. Textiles stand next to agriculture as an income generation activity for most of the rural population. India has been renowned for its printed cotton clothes since the 12 Century and creative processes flourished as the fabric received royal patronage. Different styles of design have been evolved in difference part of Country and District Barmer in Rajasthan is famous for its bold and vibrant motifs know by the name of ‘Barmer hand prints’. The colors mainly used in Barmer hand prints are red, blue and maroon and motifs are mainly floral and geometrical. Hand Block Printing is such an art which can be used for making every design, every piece of cloth unique and different from others, which could never be possible by using automated machinery wherein 100s of meters of fabric would come out in the same design and color. The present study was conducted to find out about the financial setup, employment pattern generated by traditional textile hand printing. A sample size of 40 units was selected randomly and study was carried out with the help of survey and observation method. Pre-testing was done with the help of 10% of the sample and then data collection was done after which raw data was coded, tabulated and statically analyzed. Study revealed that profession of printing was hereditary and carried out generation to generation from father to son. The units were Small scale units which did not require heavy investments and provide employment to many people. In Barmer hand printing units, the worker employed did not require higher qualification except skill and efficiency. Thus this traditional textile printing plays a vital role in providing employment at every level and to all age group people. In Barmer, women are also cooperating in maintaining and managing the units. Thus Barmer hand prints provides sustainable livelihood to many local families. It is the essence of India and the crafts that make India stand out in the world, one of the numerous arts and crafts that are slowly dyeing and so have to be renewed and brought back to life. The diversification of design in the handloom sector is the need of the hour.

Optical evaluation of ink prints made with heat-treated alder and birch

Japanese woodblock printmaking is a traditional printing method practiced for centuries. The modern challenge to this fine art is the constantly decreasing amount of available wood, wild cherry tree, which has been traditionally used as a printing block material. The increasing amount of interest focuses on finding alternative wood types, which would compare successfully with the desired quality of the wild cherry tree. Our initial research has shown that heat-treated alder and birch trees could both be considered as possible alternatives for block material. In this paper we introduce the optical characterization (CIELAB color and gloss) of black ink prints made on two different handmade papers with printing blocks made of low-temperature (120°C, 140°C) heat-treated alder and birch. Results show lowered ink transfer from wood when the heat treatment temperature rises, more transferred ink from alder, and printing paper differences due to fiber content differences.

Monkey’s Friends by R. Brown

Brown, Ruth. Monkey’s Friends. [London, England], Andersen Press Ltd, 2012. Print. Prolific English children’s author/illustrator Ruth Brown has created a delightful book in Monkey’s Friends. It is a simple rhymed text telling the story of monkey going through the forest, meeting different animals and greeting them. Each two page spread shows monkey greeting an animal whom we can see peeking out of the bushes. Every facing page is covered by a half-page flap. When the half-page is turned, the hidden animal is revealed and the animal’s name is printed on the flap. Brown’s acrylic paintings are fun. Monkey is doing something different in each image. Sometimes he hangs by his tail. Other times he is sitting on a branch or a rock or peering through grass. Each time his expression is alive. Brown also does an excellent job of communicating motion in her paintings. When you lift the flap to see crocodile, he seems to explode out of the water and you see water flying in all directions. While Brown’s animals are realistic, her vegetation is quite unusual. The leaves are highly-textured and look like they might have been done with block prints. The vegetation seems to be simultaneously dense and see-through. The result is a bright and colourful environment for Monkey and his friends. Young children will enjoy looking for the hidden animals and finding them when the flap is turned. Highly recommended for public and elementary school libraries. Recommendation: 4 stars out of 4 Reviewer: Sandy Campbell Sandy is a Health Sciences Librarian at the University of Alberta, who has written hundreds of book reviews across many disciplines. Sandy thinks that sharing books with children is one of the greatest gifts anyone can give.

A study on the Printing Block Destruction and Book Burning of Yegi Yupyeon

A study on the Printing Block Destruction and Book Burning of Yegi Yupyeon

A Study on the Notes in the Wooden Printing Blocks - Centered on the Wooden Printing Blocks of Korean Studies Advancement Center -

A Study on the Notes in the Wooden Printing Blocks - Centered on the Wooden Printing Blocks of Korean Studies Advancement Center -

NUMERICAL SIMULATION OF VENTILATION IN THE STORAGE HALLS OF TRIPITAKA KOREANA AT HAEINSA TEMPLE IN CASE OF BUILDING REARRANGEMENT

Haeinsa temple is famous for over 80 000 wooden printing blocks of Buddhist scriptures called Tripitaka Koreana and its storage halls, both of which have been registered as the world cultural heritages by UNESCO. The objective of the present paper is to investigate the ventilation flow in the storage halls of Tripitaka Koreana in the case of building rearrangement in Haeinsa temple. Three-dimensional flow simulations were performed with the detailed geometry of all buildings in the temple. The slatted windows on walls of the storage halls and Tripitaka Koreana stored in the shelves inside the storage halls were modeled in detail to predict reliable ventilation performance. A tree canopy model was also adopted to take into account of the effect of the forest surrounding the temple. Wind velocities as inlet boundary condition were imposed from meteorological statistical data. The numerical results were obtained for the effects of the wind direction, wind speed and tree canopy model on the ventilation performance of the storage halls. It was shown from the numerical results that the ventilation flow distribution at the storage halls in the case of building rearrangement would not be significantly altered compared to that before rearrangement.

Wooden Printing Blocks Held in the Seowons in Gyeongnam Province Listed on the Nupango

Wooden Printing Blocks Held in the Seowons in Gyeongnam Province Listed on the Nupango