Ukiyo-e: Japanese Woodblock Prints and the Floating World
The word ukiyo-e means "pictures of the floating world" — the world of pleasure, theater, and fashionable life in the cities of Edo-period Japan (1603-1868). But the term is misleading if it suggests the merely decorative. The woodblock print tradition of Japan produced, in its two and a half centuries of production, not only the genre scenes of actors and courtesans for which it is best known, but a complete visual encyclopedia of Japanese sacred mythology, natural philosophy, and cosmic imagination. Hokusai's Great Wave — the most reproduced artwork in history — is not a landscape. It is a meditation on the relationship between the human (the tiny fishing boats beneath the wave) and the cosmic (the wave itself, and behind it, the eternal stillness of Mount Fuji). Kuniyoshi's supernatural scenes — demons, ghosts, warrior heroes battling giant skeletons — encode the Shinto and Buddhist understanding of a world populated by spirits at every level of existence. Hiroshi...