Ancient crafts give designers a heritage of creative ideas

Innovation and dedication

In early 2010s, the printing house cooperated with film director Feng Xiaogang to create the subtitles for the movie 1942 that is about a disastrous famine in China during that chaotic year of war.

"Feng was not satisfied with the font of the subtitles, and he happened to see some of our products at an airport and came to us. After one of our calligraphers wrote the subtitles by hand, we stamped them on blocks, carved them, and printed them on paper. Then based on the printed version, they created the subtitles on the screen," Gu says.

They impressed a lot of people.

"The woodblock printing style added a sense of vicissitude to the subtitles", Gu says.

In recent years, the printing house has also created some cultural creative products for students who are going to attend college entrance examinations, such as framed pictures with patterns of bamboo and the four words jin bang ti ming (achieving high scores), which are very popular.

Apart from the Canal Towns single-page calendar, they also produce Yutu Xianhua Tu, a New Year painting created for the Year of the Rabbit, inspired by the pattern on apparel kept in the Palace Museum in Beijing. The production capacity is about 200 copies a month.

In May, more than 10 master carvers and printers worked together to reproduce a woodblock print that has been considered as the peak work of the craft in China — Qunxian Heshou Tu (congratulations from gods and goddesses to an elderly person on his or her birthday). They created a digital version of the work and uploaded it online. About 32,000 people snapped up digital copies of the work.

"As more people are becoming interested in traditional culture thanks to efforts of the government, they are willing to buy products with traditional cultural elements," Gu says.

Compared with the signature delicacy of woodblock prints created in Yangzhou, which used to serve the literati in ancient times, woodblock printing techniques applied to serve the needs of ordinary people have generated other printing styles. One of these is Jia Ma of Southwest China's Yunnan province.