EXHIBITION OVERVIEW

As with Katsushika Hokusai’s iconic masterpiece, “The Great Wave off Kanagawa,” ukiyo-e woodblock prints swept through Japan’s artistic milieu in the Edo period (1603-1868) like a powerful wave. Yet the genre’s prominence gradually declined as lithography and photography were introduced from abroad in the Meiji era.
Still, ukiyo-e artists turned to new realms—from modernized Japanese prints to illustrated reports of current affairs—to capture a society dramatically upended by rapid Westernization. They turned to illustrated books, followed by a boom in frontispiece prints adorning books and literary journals. Then, in the Taishō period, the publisher Shōzaburō Watanabe undertook both the revival and reinvention of nishiki-e, producing a fresh body of shin-hanga (“new prints”) by drawing on traditional techniques and the collaborative system of production.
This exhibition explores how ukiyo-e artists strove to restore the “ukiyo-e spirit” of time-honored skills and techniques, of its timeless sense of beauty and wonder. It draws largely on the works of collector Kazunori Kanbe donated to the Tokyo Fuji Art Museum and is organized into three thematic segments.