WEIGHT is a recalibration by Zhang Fuming of the meanings and intentions of making woodcut.
The process of examining how he works to create a woodcut is self-reflexive. Going beyond the historical burdens of woodcut art, Zhang needs to create from a clean slate.
Such production involves logical selection of actions and objects. Zhang pares down woodcut preparation and its actions, re-creating the imagery of its physical work and methods. He underscores the grinding slowness, the uneven, messy and repetitive nature, the physicality and laborious motions of art-making.
Zhang’s other consideration is the choice of objects to document as images. Items from his home and work life appear on the cuts of wood and their prints. These are as idiomatic as they are real—a door, locks and walls, baby toys, a trophy, a rice bowl, a bird on a barbed wire fence. The images are magnified, simplified, each thought framed singularly on its own matrix of wood or paper.
The truth of each frame belongs to Zhang, and to anyone who values the deeper meanings of what he has drawn. There is no conclusion, only a shared consciousness of his work, and the purity of what he has left on the matrix.
Zhang is an alumnus of LASALLE’s Diploma in Fine Arts programme.
“Woodcut is a contemporary visual language grounded in discipline, duration and material resistance. In WEIGHT, the image is inseparable from the conditions that produce it: labour, pressure, repetition, hesitation, and the accumulation of irreversible decisions.”
– Zhang Fuming, 2026
Image: Pressure Study, Zhang Fuming (2026)
