Like well-written prose, the current exhibition of works from the Central Academy of Fine Art, Beijing, in Hartell Gallery teaches its audience how to view, or read, it. This is especially helpful because the audience of a show so far from its home is inherently foreign. Although the artistic language of artists from the eastern and western hemispheres is similar enough, the tone of the works from half a world away is perhaps unfamiliar to the western viewer. The show’s teaching mechanism refrains from being didactic; rather, it unobtrusively introduces a lens through which to understand its elements.

The “mechanism” this exhibition employs is, surprisingly, video. More and more frequently, print media and video art are becoming shared interests of contemporary artists. Certainly, this is true of the Central Academy artists featured in this show, one of whom, Yang Ying, has both video and printed works on display. Of her two video pieces, the one most important to the show is titled “What Kind of Person You Are?” — one of many endearingly almost-perfect translations throughout the exhibition. A loop several minutes long cycles through the testimonials of a dozen or so adults, speaking Chinese and subtitled in English, each describing the artist. “You are a person who makes us feel unexpected,” one woman glowingly reports. A man jokes, “You are a good girl, but I’m not the right man for you.” Another chides playfully, “You are a southerner, I feel you often lose things.” Many people note that the artist “loves studying and laboring,” and is “always working;” the woman who says, “You insist on one direction from beginning to end” puts it best.

These talking portraits address the audience, partly; mostly they explain, scold, praise, make confessions to and joke with the unseen artist. Not a single person in the video behaves as if they’re talking to a camera. This piece accomplishes two things: It profiles an artist, a complete stranger to the viewer, whose prints hang nearby, and it creates an intimate picture of the community in which this artist lives and works. The viewer can imagine what the artist values, what she might talk about with a friend at a café, what kind of reaction to her work she expects from her peers — in short, her life’s atmosphere. It is a complete success.

While the videos do catch the viewer’s attention first, they do not overshadow the prints. The printed works by a handful of artists, faculty and students at the Academy in Beijing incorporate elements of woodcut, silkscreen and collage, and range in size from two feet wide to the length of an entire wall (the wall-length print, a tiled woodblock print by Cao Pailun called “A Fly Without Head” that took six months to hand-cut, is paradoxically both pixilated and ethereal). They are, like the videos, intimate and atmospheric, effectively describing a cohesive place although they cover different genres and were made by artists with quite diverse styles.

Interestingly, every piece in the show is figurative. Even the most abstracted work, “Light #2” by Xiao Nan, is anchored in representation by its title and its place in a series of other (more instantly recognizable) figurative images. Nan’s work is two-dimensional but has a sculptural sensibility and seems to be continuously moving on the page, as if it hasn’t set yet. It is the most uncanny image in the show.

Others, from the domestic “Red” by Zhao Jingxuo to the Lu Liping’s bucolic “Farm Land,” are opposite in subject matter yet nearly identical in tone to “Light.” I wonder if the collection has such a cumulative and tangible climate principally because it is so foreign, or because I am so foreign to it. While that may be one explanation, the individual works are together undeniably intertwined and symbiotic, like points in a web. To attribute their unified vision to nationality alone is to underestimate them.

The Chinese national identity, however, is always important when it comes to printmaking, as China produced the very first prints in the world. The artists featured in Hartell Gallery, as is typical of many contemporary Chinese printmakers, have plucked elements and techniques from traditional eastern woodcut and western intaglio printing as well as modern commercial printmaking (silkscreen).

Western contributions notwithstanding, the Chinese did it first, and they did it best. For this reason Cornell University has been involved since 2000 in an ongoing project aimed at bringing Chinese artists, printmakers and critics to the Ithaca campus, and this show is one of many iterations — “part of a larger exchange,” said Prof. Elisabeth Meyer art — in the series. It is thanks to the efforts of Prof. Meyer and Prof. Xiaowen Chen of Alfredy University, who has ties with the Beijing Academy of Fine Art, that this show (including the artists, who visited Ithaca and New York City facilities this weekend) is here. And, fortunately for all those who missed it last week, this exhibition — including a gallery talk Wednesday at 8 a.m. by Prof. Chen — marches on for an unprecedented, but well-deserved, second week.

Prints from Central Academy of Fine Art, Beijing will be on display in the John Hartell Gallery in Sibley Dome through Friday, Sep. 25. Admission is free.