On July 16, 2011, the exhibition Multiple Impressions: Contemporary Chinese Woodblock Prints opened at the University of Michigan Museum of Art (UMMA) in Ann Arbor. The exhibition brought together 114 woodblock prints made by forty-one Chinese printmakers between 2000 and 2010, creating the first large-scale display of such works in the United States. It was made possible with support from many institutions, among them the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Henry Luce Foundation, the China Academy of Art in Hangzhou, and several offices within the University of Michigan. As the curator of the exhibition, and after having worked on the complex project for over three years, I was elated to see the exhibition expertly and splendidly presented in two galleries at UMMA. Appreciating in the museum setting all the prints, almost every one of which I had examined and admired in different parts of China – from Puer in the southwest to Daqing in the northeast – I felt I was welcoming a group of dear friends arriving from afar for a joyous gathering. It had been a novel but most rewarding experience to curate the exhibition, in part because the process gave me an opportunity to reach beyond the academic circle and to present my research to the American public in such a direct and accessible way. The experience also prompted reflections that subsequently went into the writing of the present volume. As a way of bringing my current work on Chinese visual culture to a conclusion, I will consider briefly a number of issues that rose in connection with the exhibition.

In the brief text panel that greeted viewers and introduced them to the art show, I made the following explanation: