Tattoo Sleeves Instant Kabuki By toshidama The adjacent photograph shows a relatively new trend for very cheap, disposable tattoo sleeves… to what end, I’m not sure. I thought I’d try one on in the interests of researching the fashion in the kabuki theatre for representing heroes and villains illustrated in ukiyo-e prints and later imitated by huge [...]
Magic in Japan – The Body of the People By toshidama In this case not necessarily the physical body – I’m thinking here of the cultural body and how that relates to the people. When we look at the extraordinary corpus of Japanese woodblock prints from the nineteenth century we are struck firstly by its hermeticism. This [...]
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 Japanese art, shunga is the [...]
Bonsai Trees in Japanese Prints – Small is Beautiful By toshidama I suppose that if you were to ask most people about traditional Japanese culture, they would talk about geishas and samurai, sushi, kimonos and bonsai trees. It’s likely though that few people would know much about the bonsai tree and probably would not have seen one. [...]
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 to as the [...]
Japanese Snow Myths By toshidama For those interested in Japanese prints it will be obvious that snow is a major subject for both landscapists and narrative artists. The most desirable Hiroshige landscapes tend to be his haunting snow scenes – these great and seemingly effortless depictions of white-out conditions… the great heavy flakes that punctuate the night [...]
There – Not There – Woodblock Prints and the Work of Paul Morrison By toshidama In ukiyo-e, as in all prints produced from blocks, there is little margin for hesitation – no grey area for the artist to prevaricate. In relief printing at its most basic, there is only the presence of a mark (black or [...]
Portraits of Sansho – Ichikawa Danjuro IX By toshidama Toshidama Gallery is currently showing some very fine Meiji woodblock prints amongst which are some extraordinary portraits of the Meiji era kabuki star Ichikawa Danjuro IX (1838 – 1903). Danjuro, probably more than any other actor, typifies our contemporary image of kabuki. There were of course many forerunners both in his [...]
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 musha-e or warrior [...]
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, [...]
Boys and Girls: Gender, Kabuki and Japanese Prints By toshidama Japanese prints can be confusing territory for those seeking certainty. Artists of the ukiyo-e revelled in “look and compare” pictures or mitate-e as it is called. Borrowing from the traditions of poetry, mitate-e pictures play ironically with the knowingness of the audience, substituting contemporary actors for historical characters or [...]
Tomoe Gozen – Woman Warrior By toshidama It is so easy to miss what’s going on in Japanese prints – sometimes just looking hard isn’t enough. There are two prints on this page, one is of a female warrior battling a man and the other is of a male warrior doing the same thing. Surprisingly – they [...]
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