Otokodate – Black Sheep of the Floating World By toshidama It’s easy to use a phrase over and over without ever really thinking about it or explaining it in any great detail. The word Otokodate is one such instance and I am aware that we use it at the gallery without clearly defining it. Otokodate [...]
The Pachyderm in the Room – Kuniyoshi’s Elephant By toshidama The elephant has long presented artists of all genres with a problem. The elephant is exotic, clearly enormous and spectacular but in captivity it lacks the dynamism, the heroism that its reputation suggests. Very few artists have successfully represented the elephant and because of the [...]
The Japanese Zodiac – Animals in Ukiyo-e by toshidama The subject of the Japanese (Chinese) zodiac would take many hundreds of pages accurately to describe. It is a complex system of Buddhist symbolism, planetary observation and Imperial obeisance. The Japanese Zodiac and calendar were introduced from China in the sixth century. The Imperial court invited [...]
Japanese Prints In Context – Kunisada Warriors By toshidama It’s a fact of history that it is not always the person that first conceived something that is remembered so much as the person who made it famous. In ukiyo-e, this is particularly true of one of the nineteenth century’s most lasting and noticeable genres – the [...]
Imaginary Journeys – Hiroshige’s Tokaido Road By toshidama There are two recent publications celebrating Hiroshige’s views of Japan: Nancy Gaffield’s poem cycle Tokaido Road (C B Editions £7.99) and Taschen’s Hiroshige – 100 Famous Views of Edo. The former is an imaginary journey along the famous Tokaido highway; one poem for each of the 53 stations, [...]
Japanese Tattoos – The Persistent Hero By toshidama Once upon a time, a long time ago, there was (perhaps) a great warrior, one of a great band of men – legendary, brave, skillful and outlawed – who saved China from invasion, who righted wrongs and stood up for the poor and oppressed. This great warrior [...]
Death of Kuniyoshi By toshidama Something not much commemorated this year is the 150th anniversary of the death of Utagawa Kuniyoshi. Kuniyoshi was one of Japan’s greatest artists and his legacy of rich designs cannot be underestimated. The inventiveness of his best prints is astonishing; he is surely to be remembered for his synthesis of [...]
Gajo – Traditional Bindings for Japanese Woodblock Prints By toshidama There’s a fantastic feeling that you get when you hold a perfect ukiyo print in your hands, one that has escaped the ravages of time. Edo (Tokyo) has been plagued by fires which were so frequent in the past that they were referred [...]
On Being a Picture Dealer & The Trouble With Hiroshige By toshidama I’ve combined two posts here because they are related. To start with I’d like to look at the relationships between dealer, artwork, value and marketplace. Let’s start with the dealer. As in every walk of life, no two dealers or galleries are the [...]
Kunichika & Warhol – Seeing Stars By toshidama The superstar is no new phenomenon nor is the intimate relationship between entertainer and publicist a product only of modern mass media. I’m interested here in Kunichika and his close relationship with two very famous kabuki actors of the late nineteenth century; and how similar that [...]
Japanese Shunga Prints – Art or Pornography? By toshidama It is the fashion, especially among connoisseurs, to make distinctions between erotica and pornography. However, it seems to me disingenuous to describe some images as pornographic and others as erotic when the distinction is only contextual or at least subjective. In the field of [...]
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