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The women of Ukiyo-e
We take a look at women as subject and artist in the art style...
April 26, 2023
Woodblock prints in the ukiyo-e ('pictures of the floating world') style are one of many cases where Japanese women are hidden in plain sight. Though omnipresent as subjects and models – bijin-ga (‘beautiful women’ pictures) boomed in the Edo period – they rarely practised as artists.
This isn’t to say they did not contribute to the form in other ways, yet most curation of ukiyo-e in Japan follows this conventional, conservative narrative, focusing on the role of ‘great men’ artists. Take Mitsubishi Ichigokan Museum’s recent blockbuster, Yoshiiku and Yoshitoshi: Ukiyo-e Masters at the Dawn of Modernization, where neither the women subjects, nor the woodblock printers responsible for the vivid colour and accuracy of the works, were much credited. Collectors neither.
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They crop up as calendar girls, courtesans, and targets of consumerism. Murasaki Shikibu, the oft-heralded author of The Tale of Genji, appears in Yoshitoshi’s One Hundred Aspects of the Moon series, and another woman as a warrior – but little context is given about them. More nuanced, perhaps, is the curation of those men warriors depicted with ‘feminine’ characteristics.
But smaller institutions are leading the way. At Yokohama History Museum, Minatozaki Painted with Flowers of the Floating World unravels the history of Minatozaki Yukaki, a pleasure district which opened in 1859, the same year as Yokohama City. It’s curated in an intimate spiral, concluding with the voices of women at its centre.
Modelled after Edo’s Yoshiwara, such ‘red-light districts’ were seen as symbols of prosperity and modernity. This hints at the commodification of women’s bodies, places to project political values, of which women themselves often denied. Some of the open-plan prints expose brothels’ unique status, as both private and public spaces. But as Yokohama boasts its global and cosmopolitan identity, the European women still seem more restrained and limited by their clothing than their Japanese counterparts.
From maps and plans of the port’s architecture, to woodblock prints (nishiki-e) of play and prostitution, newspaper reports and handwritten letters, diverse media exposes the pleasure district from pluralised perspectives. The archive materials are especially powerful, humanising the women who worked in these places by reference to their cursive handwriting, and calling out ‘prostitute’s apprenticeships’ for what they often were – forms of human trafficking. Above all, we see its status in popular interest and popular culture, and thus why these prints are overrepresented in the historical archives.
Beyond and adjacent to ukiyo-e, women worked too. And Japanese Paintings of Modern Osaka is the model of curation. Using visual art to understand the city’s unique identity, and vice versa, Nakanoshima connects with Osaka’s contemporary culture. And yes, women wearing kimonos get a discount.
A city shaped by commerce, migration, and Chinese influences, Osaka’s particular contribution to Japanese modern art is scarcely acknowledged. In part, it is due to a historic lack of local and regional collections; this exhibition is the first of Osakan nihonga (a technique favouring washing/Japanese paper and silk), and also celebrates the museum’s own one year anniversary.
It’s a history which includes and integrates women, and it’s huge. It begins with the familiar beauties and bijin-ga - Kitano Tsunetomi’s voyeuristic gaze on young girls with lost faces, over-sexualised. A point of access, from which a torrent of works tears up our expectations.
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We see a plurality of women, both as represented by men, and as artists in their own right. Much attention is paid to Shima Seien, a pioneering teacher, and one of the ‘three gardens of three cities’ along with Uemura Shoen (Kyoto) and Kunen Ikeda (Tokyo). Other heroes include Hashimoto Seiko, who refused to work to commission in order to depict what she wanted. Ikuta Kacho, who ‘inherited aspects’ of her teacher Suga Tatehiko, whilst ‘actively depicting the customs of her own time’.
Her boundary-pushing hanging scroll of the Tenjin Festival stands out from its contemporaries for its square format, and integration of motifs from China. In the final rooms, every work is a shock, a stark contrast in style and format from that curated next to it. The folding screens with great blank spaces, which focus the attention on their subjects, are a highlight.
Nor does the Nakanoshima languor in hyper-local history; by focusing on legacy – students, education, and the next generation of artists – it looks to the future, and closes with the news of their next exhibition, Definitive Edition! Osaka in the Eyes of Women Painters.
Established in 1914, Osaka’s Hakuyousha School was one of few gender co-educational schools in Japan. This place, where men and women (here, ‘people’) practised together, was one reason artists were drawn to the city – migrations which speak of individual agency.
This cosmopolitanism is embodied by Nakamura Teii’s works, where a woman reads a Japanese magazine, adorned with the image of Marlene Dietrich. She wears both a black kimono, a symbol of Japan, and a black ribbon, of Western Europe. Her very being challenges the binaries of East and West, and womanhood.
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Overlaps can be found with KYOCERA’s current display of art from the 1930s, which subtly explores this complex relationship between consumerism, and the liberation or limitation of women. Moga (‘modern girls’) abound; but here, they sometimes seem bored by shopping.
The Fascinating Showa-Modern pays attention to the lived experiences of women in the Taisho-Showa period, and 20th century more widely. We see them enjoying ‘Western pursuits’ like golf, archery, and dog-walking, but also practising as conductors, doctors, and nurses. Less is presented of the umbrella motif – a ‘sadistic’ trope from bijin-ga where women struggle against the wind, and natural environment. More women are waiting at the new Tokyo Train Station, exhausted from a day at work.
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Both nihonga and yoga, Japanese and Western artworks, are curated in conversation – still, Japan comes first in the captions, with Western influences othered as ‘additions’, or ‘exotic’. In other self-portraits, the women artists seem to lighten their skin, or emphasise more Western or European facial features, a nod to complex ideas about modernity in post-Meiji Japan; another avenue for future exhibitions about the women of Japanese artworks.
Minatozaki Painted with Flowers of the Floating World is on view at the Yokohama History Museum, Yokohama until 7 May 2023.
Japanese Paintings of Modern Osaka opened at the Nakanoshima Museum of Art, Osaka in 2023, and is currently on view at Tokyo Station Gallery, Tokyo until 11 June 2023.
Collection Room Special Display: The Fascinating Showa-Modern is on view at Kyoto City KYOCERA Museum of Art, Kyoto until 18 June 2023.
Make sure to collect your Yamos on the gowithYamo app with each exhibitionsyou visit!
Woodblock prints in the ukiyo-e ('pictures of the floating world') style are one of many cases where Japanese women are hidden in plain sight. Though omnipresent as subjects and models – bijin-ga (‘beautiful women’ pictures) boomed in the Edo period – they rarely practised as artists.
This isn’t to say they did not contribute to the form in other ways, yet most curation of ukiyo-e in Japan follows this conventional, conservative narrative, focusing on the role of ‘great men’ artists. Take Mitsubishi Ichigokan Museum’s recent blockbuster, Yoshiiku and Yoshitoshi: Ukiyo-e Masters at the Dawn of Modernization, where neither the women subjects, nor the woodblock printers responsible for the vivid colour and accuracy of the works, were much credited. Collectors neither.
They crop up as calendar girls, courtesans, and targets of consumerism. Murasaki Shikibu, the oft-heralded author of The Tale of Genji, appears in Yoshitoshi’s One Hundred Aspects of the Moon series, and another woman as a warrior – but little context is given about them. More nuanced, perhaps, is the curation of those men warriors depicted with ‘feminine’ characteristics.
But smaller institutions are leading the way. At Yokohama History Museum, Minatozaki Painted with Flowers of the Floating World unravels the history of Minatozaki Yukaki, a pleasure district which opened in 1859, the same year as Yokohama City. It’s curated in an intimate spiral, concluding with the voices of women at its centre.
Modelled after Edo’s Yoshiwara, such ‘red-light districts’ were seen as symbols of prosperity and modernity. This hints at the commodification of women’s bodies, places to project political values, of which women themselves often denied. Some of the open-plan prints expose brothels’ unique status, as both private and public spaces. But as Yokohama boasts its global and cosmopolitan identity, the European women still seem more restrained and limited by their clothing than their Japanese counterparts.
From maps and plans of the port’s architecture, to woodblock prints (nishiki-e) of play and prostitution, newspaper reports and handwritten letters, diverse media exposes the pleasure district from pluralised perspectives. The archive materials are especially powerful, humanising the women who worked in these places by reference to their cursive handwriting, and calling out ‘prostitute’s apprenticeships’ for what they often were – forms of human trafficking. Above all, we see its status in popular interest and popular culture, and thus why these prints are overrepresented in the historical archives.
Beyond and adjacent to ukiyo-e, women worked too. And Japanese Paintings of Modern Osaka is the model of curation. Using visual art to understand the city’s unique identity, and vice versa, Nakanoshima connects with Osaka’s contemporary culture. And yes, women wearing kimonos get a discount.
A city shaped by commerce, migration, and Chinese influences, Osaka’s particular contribution to Japanese modern art is scarcely acknowledged. In part, it is due to a historic lack of local and regional collections; this exhibition is the first of Osakan nihonga (a technique favouring washing/Japanese paper and silk), and also celebrates the museum’s own one year anniversary.
It’s a history which includes and integrates women, and it’s huge. It begins with the familiar beauties and bijin-ga - Kitano Tsunetomi’s voyeuristic gaze on young girls with lost faces, over-sexualised. A point of access, from which a torrent of works tears up our expectations.
We see a plurality of women, both as represented by men, and as artists in their own right. Much attention is paid to Shima Seien, a pioneering teacher, and one of the ‘three gardens of three cities’ along with Uemura Shoen (Kyoto) and Kunen Ikeda (Tokyo). Other heroes include Hashimoto Seiko, who refused to work to commission in order to depict what she wanted. Ikuta Kacho, who ‘inherited aspects’ of her teacher Suga Tatehiko, whilst ‘actively depicting the customs of her own time’.
Her boundary-pushing hanging scroll of the Tenjin Festival stands out from its contemporaries for its square format, and integration of motifs from China. In the final rooms, every work is a shock, a stark contrast in style and format from that curated next to it. The folding screens with great blank spaces, which focus the attention on their subjects, are a highlight.
Nor does the Nakanoshima languor in hyper-local history; by focusing on legacy – students, education, and the next generation of artists – it looks to the future, and closes with the news of their next exhibition, Definitive Edition! Osaka in the Eyes of Women Painters.
Established in 1914, Osaka’s Hakuyousha School was one of few gender co-educational schools in Japan. This place, where men and women (here, ‘people’) practised together, was one reason artists were drawn to the city – migrations which speak of individual agency.
This cosmopolitanism is embodied by Nakamura Teii’s works, where a woman reads a Japanese magazine, adorned with the image of Marlene Dietrich. She wears both a black kimono, a symbol of Japan, and a black ribbon, of Western Europe. Her very being challenges the binaries of East and West, and womanhood.
Overlaps can be found with KYOCERA’s current display of art from the 1930s, which subtly explores this complex relationship between consumerism, and the liberation or limitation of women. Moga (‘modern girls’) abound; but here, they sometimes seem bored by shopping.
The Fascinating Showa-Modern pays attention to the lived experiences of women in the Taisho-Showa period, and 20th century more widely. We see them enjoying ‘Western pursuits’ like golf, archery, and dog-walking, but also practising as conductors, doctors, and nurses. Less is presented of the umbrella motif – a ‘sadistic’ trope from bijin-ga where women struggle against the wind, and natural environment. More women are waiting at the new Tokyo Train Station, exhausted from a day at work.
Both nihonga and yoga, Japanese and Western artworks, are curated in conversation – still, Japan comes first in the captions, with Western influences othered as ‘additions’, or ‘exotic’. In other self-portraits, the women artists seem to lighten their skin, or emphasise more Western or European facial features, a nod to complex ideas about modernity in post-Meiji Japan; another avenue for future exhibitions about the women of Japanese artworks.
Minatozaki Painted with Flowers of the Floating World is on view at the Yokohama History Museum, Yokohama until 7 May 2023.
Japanese Paintings of Modern Osaka opened at the Nakanoshima Museum of Art, Osaka in 2023, and is currently on view at Tokyo Station Gallery, Tokyo until 11 June 2023.
Collection Room Special Display: The Fascinating Showa-Modern is on view at Kyoto City KYOCERA Museum of Art, Kyoto until 18 June 2023.
Make sure to collect your Yamos on the gowithYamo app with each exhibitionsyou visit!
Woodblock prints in the ukiyo-e ('pictures of the floating world') style are one of many cases where Japanese women are hidden in plain sight. Though omnipresent as subjects and models – bijin-ga (‘beautiful women’ pictures) boomed in the Edo period – they rarely practised as artists.
This isn’t to say they did not contribute to the form in other ways, yet most curation of ukiyo-e in Japan follows this conventional, conservative narrative, focusing on the role of ‘great men’ artists. Take Mitsubishi Ichigokan Museum’s recent blockbuster, Yoshiiku and Yoshitoshi: Ukiyo-e Masters at the Dawn of Modernization, where neither the women subjects, nor the woodblock printers responsible for the vivid colour and accuracy of the works, were much credited. Collectors neither.
They crop up as calendar girls, courtesans, and targets of consumerism. Murasaki Shikibu, the oft-heralded author of The Tale of Genji, appears in Yoshitoshi’s One Hundred Aspects of the Moon series, and another woman as a warrior – but little context is given about them. More nuanced, perhaps, is the curation of those men warriors depicted with ‘feminine’ characteristics.
But smaller institutions are leading the way. At Yokohama History Museum, Minatozaki Painted with Flowers of the Floating World unravels the history of Minatozaki Yukaki, a pleasure district which opened in 1859, the same year as Yokohama City. It’s curated in an intimate spiral, concluding with the voices of women at its centre.
Modelled after Edo’s Yoshiwara, such ‘red-light districts’ were seen as symbols of prosperity and modernity. This hints at the commodification of women’s bodies, places to project political values, of which women themselves often denied. Some of the open-plan prints expose brothels’ unique status, as both private and public spaces. But as Yokohama boasts its global and cosmopolitan identity, the European women still seem more restrained and limited by their clothing than their Japanese counterparts.
From maps and plans of the port’s architecture, to woodblock prints (nishiki-e) of play and prostitution, newspaper reports and handwritten letters, diverse media exposes the pleasure district from pluralised perspectives. The archive materials are especially powerful, humanising the women who worked in these places by reference to their cursive handwriting, and calling out ‘prostitute’s apprenticeships’ for what they often were – forms of human trafficking. Above all, we see its status in popular interest and popular culture, and thus why these prints are overrepresented in the historical archives.
Beyond and adjacent to ukiyo-e, women worked too. And Japanese Paintings of Modern Osaka is the model of curation. Using visual art to understand the city’s unique identity, and vice versa, Nakanoshima connects with Osaka’s contemporary culture. And yes, women wearing kimonos get a discount.
A city shaped by commerce, migration, and Chinese influences, Osaka’s particular contribution to Japanese modern art is scarcely acknowledged. In part, it is due to a historic lack of local and regional collections; this exhibition is the first of Osakan nihonga (a technique favouring washing/Japanese paper and silk), and also celebrates the museum’s own one year anniversary.
It’s a history which includes and integrates women, and it’s huge. It begins with the familiar beauties and bijin-ga - Kitano Tsunetomi’s voyeuristic gaze on young girls with lost faces, over-sexualised. A point of access, from which a torrent of works tears up our expectations.
We see a plurality of women, both as represented by men, and as artists in their own right. Much attention is paid to Shima Seien, a pioneering teacher, and one of the ‘three gardens of three cities’ along with Uemura Shoen (Kyoto) and Kunen Ikeda (Tokyo). Other heroes include Hashimoto Seiko, who refused to work to commission in order to depict what she wanted. Ikuta Kacho, who ‘inherited aspects’ of her teacher Suga Tatehiko, whilst ‘actively depicting the customs of her own time’.
Her boundary-pushing hanging scroll of the Tenjin Festival stands out from its contemporaries for its square format, and integration of motifs from China. In the final rooms, every work is a shock, a stark contrast in style and format from that curated next to it. The folding screens with great blank spaces, which focus the attention on their subjects, are a highlight.
Nor does the Nakanoshima languor in hyper-local history; by focusing on legacy – students, education, and the next generation of artists – it looks to the future, and closes with the news of their next exhibition, Definitive Edition! Osaka in the Eyes of Women Painters.
Established in 1914, Osaka’s Hakuyousha School was one of few gender co-educational schools in Japan. This place, where men and women (here, ‘people’) practised together, was one reason artists were drawn to the city – migrations which speak of individual agency.
This cosmopolitanism is embodied by Nakamura Teii’s works, where a woman reads a Japanese magazine, adorned with the image of Marlene Dietrich. She wears both a black kimono, a symbol of Japan, and a black ribbon, of Western Europe. Her very being challenges the binaries of East and West, and womanhood.
Overlaps can be found with KYOCERA’s current display of art from the 1930s, which subtly explores this complex relationship between consumerism, and the liberation or limitation of women. Moga (‘modern girls’) abound; but here, they sometimes seem bored by shopping.
The Fascinating Showa-Modern pays attention to the lived experiences of women in the Taisho-Showa period, and 20th century more widely. We see them enjoying ‘Western pursuits’ like golf, archery, and dog-walking, but also practising as conductors, doctors, and nurses. Less is presented of the umbrella motif – a ‘sadistic’ trope from bijin-ga where women struggle against the wind, and natural environment. More women are waiting at the new Tokyo Train Station, exhausted from a day at work.
Both nihonga and yoga, Japanese and Western artworks, are curated in conversation – still, Japan comes first in the captions, with Western influences othered as ‘additions’, or ‘exotic’. In other self-portraits, the women artists seem to lighten their skin, or emphasise more Western or European facial features, a nod to complex ideas about modernity in post-Meiji Japan; another avenue for future exhibitions about the women of Japanese artworks.
Minatozaki Painted with Flowers of the Floating World is on view at the Yokohama History Museum, Yokohama until 7 May 2023.
Japanese Paintings of Modern Osaka opened at the Nakanoshima Museum of Art, Osaka in 2023, and is currently on view at Tokyo Station Gallery, Tokyo until 11 June 2023.
Collection Room Special Display: The Fascinating Showa-Modern is on view at Kyoto City KYOCERA Museum of Art, Kyoto until 18 June 2023.
Make sure to collect your Yamos on the gowithYamo app with each exhibitionsyou visit!
Woodblock prints in the ukiyo-e ('pictures of the floating world') style are one of many cases where Japanese women are hidden in plain sight. Though omnipresent as subjects and models – bijin-ga (‘beautiful women’ pictures) boomed in the Edo period – they rarely practised as artists.
This isn’t to say they did not contribute to the form in other ways, yet most curation of ukiyo-e in Japan follows this conventional, conservative narrative, focusing on the role of ‘great men’ artists. Take Mitsubishi Ichigokan Museum’s recent blockbuster, Yoshiiku and Yoshitoshi: Ukiyo-e Masters at the Dawn of Modernization, where neither the women subjects, nor the woodblock printers responsible for the vivid colour and accuracy of the works, were much credited. Collectors neither.
They crop up as calendar girls, courtesans, and targets of consumerism. Murasaki Shikibu, the oft-heralded author of The Tale of Genji, appears in Yoshitoshi’s One Hundred Aspects of the Moon series, and another woman as a warrior – but little context is given about them. More nuanced, perhaps, is the curation of those men warriors depicted with ‘feminine’ characteristics.
But smaller institutions are leading the way. At Yokohama History Museum, Minatozaki Painted with Flowers of the Floating World unravels the history of Minatozaki Yukaki, a pleasure district which opened in 1859, the same year as Yokohama City. It’s curated in an intimate spiral, concluding with the voices of women at its centre.
Modelled after Edo’s Yoshiwara, such ‘red-light districts’ were seen as symbols of prosperity and modernity. This hints at the commodification of women’s bodies, places to project political values, of which women themselves often denied. Some of the open-plan prints expose brothels’ unique status, as both private and public spaces. But as Yokohama boasts its global and cosmopolitan identity, the European women still seem more restrained and limited by their clothing than their Japanese counterparts.
From maps and plans of the port’s architecture, to woodblock prints (nishiki-e) of play and prostitution, newspaper reports and handwritten letters, diverse media exposes the pleasure district from pluralised perspectives. The archive materials are especially powerful, humanising the women who worked in these places by reference to their cursive handwriting, and calling out ‘prostitute’s apprenticeships’ for what they often were – forms of human trafficking. Above all, we see its status in popular interest and popular culture, and thus why these prints are overrepresented in the historical archives.
Beyond and adjacent to ukiyo-e, women worked too. And Japanese Paintings of Modern Osaka is the model of curation. Using visual art to understand the city’s unique identity, and vice versa, Nakanoshima connects with Osaka’s contemporary culture. And yes, women wearing kimonos get a discount.
A city shaped by commerce, migration, and Chinese influences, Osaka’s particular contribution to Japanese modern art is scarcely acknowledged. In part, it is due to a historic lack of local and regional collections; this exhibition is the first of Osakan nihonga (a technique favouring washing/Japanese paper and silk), and also celebrates the museum’s own one year anniversary.
It’s a history which includes and integrates women, and it’s huge. It begins with the familiar beauties and bijin-ga - Kitano Tsunetomi’s voyeuristic gaze on young girls with lost faces, over-sexualised. A point of access, from which a torrent of works tears up our expectations.
We see a plurality of women, both as represented by men, and as artists in their own right. Much attention is paid to Shima Seien, a pioneering teacher, and one of the ‘three gardens of three cities’ along with Uemura Shoen (Kyoto) and Kunen Ikeda (Tokyo). Other heroes include Hashimoto Seiko, who refused to work to commission in order to depict what she wanted. Ikuta Kacho, who ‘inherited aspects’ of her teacher Suga Tatehiko, whilst ‘actively depicting the customs of her own time’.
Her boundary-pushing hanging scroll of the Tenjin Festival stands out from its contemporaries for its square format, and integration of motifs from China. In the final rooms, every work is a shock, a stark contrast in style and format from that curated next to it. The folding screens with great blank spaces, which focus the attention on their subjects, are a highlight.
Nor does the Nakanoshima languor in hyper-local history; by focusing on legacy – students, education, and the next generation of artists – it looks to the future, and closes with the news of their next exhibition, Definitive Edition! Osaka in the Eyes of Women Painters.
Established in 1914, Osaka’s Hakuyousha School was one of few gender co-educational schools in Japan. This place, where men and women (here, ‘people’) practised together, was one reason artists were drawn to the city – migrations which speak of individual agency.
This cosmopolitanism is embodied by Nakamura Teii’s works, where a woman reads a Japanese magazine, adorned with the image of Marlene Dietrich. She wears both a black kimono, a symbol of Japan, and a black ribbon, of Western Europe. Her very being challenges the binaries of East and West, and womanhood.
Overlaps can be found with KYOCERA’s current display of art from the 1930s, which subtly explores this complex relationship between consumerism, and the liberation or limitation of women. Moga (‘modern girls’) abound; but here, they sometimes seem bored by shopping.
The Fascinating Showa-Modern pays attention to the lived experiences of women in the Taisho-Showa period, and 20th century more widely. We see them enjoying ‘Western pursuits’ like golf, archery, and dog-walking, but also practising as conductors, doctors, and nurses. Less is presented of the umbrella motif – a ‘sadistic’ trope from bijin-ga where women struggle against the wind, and natural environment. More women are waiting at the new Tokyo Train Station, exhausted from a day at work.
Both nihonga and yoga, Japanese and Western artworks, are curated in conversation – still, Japan comes first in the captions, with Western influences othered as ‘additions’, or ‘exotic’. In other self-portraits, the women artists seem to lighten their skin, or emphasise more Western or European facial features, a nod to complex ideas about modernity in post-Meiji Japan; another avenue for future exhibitions about the women of Japanese artworks.
Minatozaki Painted with Flowers of the Floating World is on view at the Yokohama History Museum, Yokohama until 7 May 2023.
Japanese Paintings of Modern Osaka opened at the Nakanoshima Museum of Art, Osaka in 2023, and is currently on view at Tokyo Station Gallery, Tokyo until 11 June 2023.
Collection Room Special Display: The Fascinating Showa-Modern is on view at Kyoto City KYOCERA Museum of Art, Kyoto until 18 June 2023.
Make sure to collect your Yamos on the gowithYamo app with each exhibitionsyou visit!
Woodblock prints in the ukiyo-e ('pictures of the floating world') style are one of many cases where Japanese women are hidden in plain sight. Though omnipresent as subjects and models – bijin-ga (‘beautiful women’ pictures) boomed in the Edo period – they rarely practised as artists.
This isn’t to say they did not contribute to the form in other ways, yet most curation of ukiyo-e in Japan follows this conventional, conservative narrative, focusing on the role of ‘great men’ artists. Take Mitsubishi Ichigokan Museum’s recent blockbuster, Yoshiiku and Yoshitoshi: Ukiyo-e Masters at the Dawn of Modernization, where neither the women subjects, nor the woodblock printers responsible for the vivid colour and accuracy of the works, were much credited. Collectors neither.
They crop up as calendar girls, courtesans, and targets of consumerism. Murasaki Shikibu, the oft-heralded author of The Tale of Genji, appears in Yoshitoshi’s One Hundred Aspects of the Moon series, and another woman as a warrior – but little context is given about them. More nuanced, perhaps, is the curation of those men warriors depicted with ‘feminine’ characteristics.
But smaller institutions are leading the way. At Yokohama History Museum, Minatozaki Painted with Flowers of the Floating World unravels the history of Minatozaki Yukaki, a pleasure district which opened in 1859, the same year as Yokohama City. It’s curated in an intimate spiral, concluding with the voices of women at its centre.
Modelled after Edo’s Yoshiwara, such ‘red-light districts’ were seen as symbols of prosperity and modernity. This hints at the commodification of women’s bodies, places to project political values, of which women themselves often denied. Some of the open-plan prints expose brothels’ unique status, as both private and public spaces. But as Yokohama boasts its global and cosmopolitan identity, the European women still seem more restrained and limited by their clothing than their Japanese counterparts.
From maps and plans of the port’s architecture, to woodblock prints (nishiki-e) of play and prostitution, newspaper reports and handwritten letters, diverse media exposes the pleasure district from pluralised perspectives. The archive materials are especially powerful, humanising the women who worked in these places by reference to their cursive handwriting, and calling out ‘prostitute’s apprenticeships’ for what they often were – forms of human trafficking. Above all, we see its status in popular interest and popular culture, and thus why these prints are overrepresented in the historical archives.
Beyond and adjacent to ukiyo-e, women worked too. And Japanese Paintings of Modern Osaka is the model of curation. Using visual art to understand the city’s unique identity, and vice versa, Nakanoshima connects with Osaka’s contemporary culture. And yes, women wearing kimonos get a discount.
A city shaped by commerce, migration, and Chinese influences, Osaka’s particular contribution to Japanese modern art is scarcely acknowledged. In part, it is due to a historic lack of local and regional collections; this exhibition is the first of Osakan nihonga (a technique favouring washing/Japanese paper and silk), and also celebrates the museum’s own one year anniversary.
It’s a history which includes and integrates women, and it’s huge. It begins with the familiar beauties and bijin-ga - Kitano Tsunetomi’s voyeuristic gaze on young girls with lost faces, over-sexualised. A point of access, from which a torrent of works tears up our expectations.
We see a plurality of women, both as represented by men, and as artists in their own right. Much attention is paid to Shima Seien, a pioneering teacher, and one of the ‘three gardens of three cities’ along with Uemura Shoen (Kyoto) and Kunen Ikeda (Tokyo). Other heroes include Hashimoto Seiko, who refused to work to commission in order to depict what she wanted. Ikuta Kacho, who ‘inherited aspects’ of her teacher Suga Tatehiko, whilst ‘actively depicting the customs of her own time’.
Her boundary-pushing hanging scroll of the Tenjin Festival stands out from its contemporaries for its square format, and integration of motifs from China. In the final rooms, every work is a shock, a stark contrast in style and format from that curated next to it. The folding screens with great blank spaces, which focus the attention on their subjects, are a highlight.
Nor does the Nakanoshima languor in hyper-local history; by focusing on legacy – students, education, and the next generation of artists – it looks to the future, and closes with the news of their next exhibition, Definitive Edition! Osaka in the Eyes of Women Painters.
Established in 1914, Osaka’s Hakuyousha School was one of few gender co-educational schools in Japan. This place, where men and women (here, ‘people’) practised together, was one reason artists were drawn to the city – migrations which speak of individual agency.
This cosmopolitanism is embodied by Nakamura Teii’s works, where a woman reads a Japanese magazine, adorned with the image of Marlene Dietrich. She wears both a black kimono, a symbol of Japan, and a black ribbon, of Western Europe. Her very being challenges the binaries of East and West, and womanhood.
Overlaps can be found with KYOCERA’s current display of art from the 1930s, which subtly explores this complex relationship between consumerism, and the liberation or limitation of women. Moga (‘modern girls’) abound; but here, they sometimes seem bored by shopping.
The Fascinating Showa-Modern pays attention to the lived experiences of women in the Taisho-Showa period, and 20th century more widely. We see them enjoying ‘Western pursuits’ like golf, archery, and dog-walking, but also practising as conductors, doctors, and nurses. Less is presented of the umbrella motif – a ‘sadistic’ trope from bijin-ga where women struggle against the wind, and natural environment. More women are waiting at the new Tokyo Train Station, exhausted from a day at work.
Both nihonga and yoga, Japanese and Western artworks, are curated in conversation – still, Japan comes first in the captions, with Western influences othered as ‘additions’, or ‘exotic’. In other self-portraits, the women artists seem to lighten their skin, or emphasise more Western or European facial features, a nod to complex ideas about modernity in post-Meiji Japan; another avenue for future exhibitions about the women of Japanese artworks.
Minatozaki Painted with Flowers of the Floating World is on view at the Yokohama History Museum, Yokohama until 7 May 2023.
Japanese Paintings of Modern Osaka opened at the Nakanoshima Museum of Art, Osaka in 2023, and is currently on view at Tokyo Station Gallery, Tokyo until 11 June 2023.
Collection Room Special Display: The Fascinating Showa-Modern is on view at Kyoto City KYOCERA Museum of Art, Kyoto until 18 June 2023.
Make sure to collect your Yamos on the gowithYamo app with each exhibitionsyou visit!
Woodblock prints in the ukiyo-e ('pictures of the floating world') style are one of many cases where Japanese women are hidden in plain sight. Though omnipresent as subjects and models – bijin-ga (‘beautiful women’ pictures) boomed in the Edo period – they rarely practised as artists.
This isn’t to say they did not contribute to the form in other ways, yet most curation of ukiyo-e in Japan follows this conventional, conservative narrative, focusing on the role of ‘great men’ artists. Take Mitsubishi Ichigokan Museum’s recent blockbuster, Yoshiiku and Yoshitoshi: Ukiyo-e Masters at the Dawn of Modernization, where neither the women subjects, nor the woodblock printers responsible for the vivid colour and accuracy of the works, were much credited. Collectors neither.
They crop up as calendar girls, courtesans, and targets of consumerism. Murasaki Shikibu, the oft-heralded author of The Tale of Genji, appears in Yoshitoshi’s One Hundred Aspects of the Moon series, and another woman as a warrior – but little context is given about them. More nuanced, perhaps, is the curation of those men warriors depicted with ‘feminine’ characteristics.
But smaller institutions are leading the way. At Yokohama History Museum, Minatozaki Painted with Flowers of the Floating World unravels the history of Minatozaki Yukaki, a pleasure district which opened in 1859, the same year as Yokohama City. It’s curated in an intimate spiral, concluding with the voices of women at its centre.
Modelled after Edo’s Yoshiwara, such ‘red-light districts’ were seen as symbols of prosperity and modernity. This hints at the commodification of women’s bodies, places to project political values, of which women themselves often denied. Some of the open-plan prints expose brothels’ unique status, as both private and public spaces. But as Yokohama boasts its global and cosmopolitan identity, the European women still seem more restrained and limited by their clothing than their Japanese counterparts.
From maps and plans of the port’s architecture, to woodblock prints (nishiki-e) of play and prostitution, newspaper reports and handwritten letters, diverse media exposes the pleasure district from pluralised perspectives. The archive materials are especially powerful, humanising the women who worked in these places by reference to their cursive handwriting, and calling out ‘prostitute’s apprenticeships’ for what they often were – forms of human trafficking. Above all, we see its status in popular interest and popular culture, and thus why these prints are overrepresented in the historical archives.
Beyond and adjacent to ukiyo-e, women worked too. And Japanese Paintings of Modern Osaka is the model of curation. Using visual art to understand the city’s unique identity, and vice versa, Nakanoshima connects with Osaka’s contemporary culture. And yes, women wearing kimonos get a discount.
A city shaped by commerce, migration, and Chinese influences, Osaka’s particular contribution to Japanese modern art is scarcely acknowledged. In part, it is due to a historic lack of local and regional collections; this exhibition is the first of Osakan nihonga (a technique favouring washing/Japanese paper and silk), and also celebrates the museum’s own one year anniversary.
It’s a history which includes and integrates women, and it’s huge. It begins with the familiar beauties and bijin-ga - Kitano Tsunetomi’s voyeuristic gaze on young girls with lost faces, over-sexualised. A point of access, from which a torrent of works tears up our expectations.
We see a plurality of women, both as represented by men, and as artists in their own right. Much attention is paid to Shima Seien, a pioneering teacher, and one of the ‘three gardens of three cities’ along with Uemura Shoen (Kyoto) and Kunen Ikeda (Tokyo). Other heroes include Hashimoto Seiko, who refused to work to commission in order to depict what she wanted. Ikuta Kacho, who ‘inherited aspects’ of her teacher Suga Tatehiko, whilst ‘actively depicting the customs of her own time’.
Her boundary-pushing hanging scroll of the Tenjin Festival stands out from its contemporaries for its square format, and integration of motifs from China. In the final rooms, every work is a shock, a stark contrast in style and format from that curated next to it. The folding screens with great blank spaces, which focus the attention on their subjects, are a highlight.
Nor does the Nakanoshima languor in hyper-local history; by focusing on legacy – students, education, and the next generation of artists – it looks to the future, and closes with the news of their next exhibition, Definitive Edition! Osaka in the Eyes of Women Painters.
Established in 1914, Osaka’s Hakuyousha School was one of few gender co-educational schools in Japan. This place, where men and women (here, ‘people’) practised together, was one reason artists were drawn to the city – migrations which speak of individual agency.
This cosmopolitanism is embodied by Nakamura Teii’s works, where a woman reads a Japanese magazine, adorned with the image of Marlene Dietrich. She wears both a black kimono, a symbol of Japan, and a black ribbon, of Western Europe. Her very being challenges the binaries of East and West, and womanhood.
Overlaps can be found with KYOCERA’s current display of art from the 1930s, which subtly explores this complex relationship between consumerism, and the liberation or limitation of women. Moga (‘modern girls’) abound; but here, they sometimes seem bored by shopping.
The Fascinating Showa-Modern pays attention to the lived experiences of women in the Taisho-Showa period, and 20th century more widely. We see them enjoying ‘Western pursuits’ like golf, archery, and dog-walking, but also practising as conductors, doctors, and nurses. Less is presented of the umbrella motif – a ‘sadistic’ trope from bijin-ga where women struggle against the wind, and natural environment. More women are waiting at the new Tokyo Train Station, exhausted from a day at work.
Both nihonga and yoga, Japanese and Western artworks, are curated in conversation – still, Japan comes first in the captions, with Western influences othered as ‘additions’, or ‘exotic’. In other self-portraits, the women artists seem to lighten their skin, or emphasise more Western or European facial features, a nod to complex ideas about modernity in post-Meiji Japan; another avenue for future exhibitions about the women of Japanese artworks.
Minatozaki Painted with Flowers of the Floating World is on view at the Yokohama History Museum, Yokohama until 7 May 2023.
Japanese Paintings of Modern Osaka opened at the Nakanoshima Museum of Art, Osaka in 2023, and is currently on view at Tokyo Station Gallery, Tokyo until 11 June 2023.
Collection Room Special Display: The Fascinating Showa-Modern is on view at Kyoto City KYOCERA Museum of Art, Kyoto until 18 June 2023.
Make sure to collect your Yamos on the gowithYamo app with each exhibitionsyou visit!
Woodblock prints in the ukiyo-e ('pictures of the floating world') style are one of many cases where Japanese women are hidden in plain sight. Though omnipresent as subjects and models – bijin-ga (‘beautiful women’ pictures) boomed in the Edo period – they rarely practised as artists.
This isn’t to say they did not contribute to the form in other ways, yet most curation of ukiyo-e in Japan follows this conventional, conservative narrative, focusing on the role of ‘great men’ artists. Take Mitsubishi Ichigokan Museum’s recent blockbuster, Yoshiiku and Yoshitoshi: Ukiyo-e Masters at the Dawn of Modernization, where neither the women subjects, nor the woodblock printers responsible for the vivid colour and accuracy of the works, were much credited. Collectors neither.
They crop up as calendar girls, courtesans, and targets of consumerism. Murasaki Shikibu, the oft-heralded author of The Tale of Genji, appears in Yoshitoshi’s One Hundred Aspects of the Moon series, and another woman as a warrior – but little context is given about them. More nuanced, perhaps, is the curation of those men warriors depicted with ‘feminine’ characteristics.
But smaller institutions are leading the way. At Yokohama History Museum, Minatozaki Painted with Flowers of the Floating World unravels the history of Minatozaki Yukaki, a pleasure district which opened in 1859, the same year as Yokohama City. It’s curated in an intimate spiral, concluding with the voices of women at its centre.
Modelled after Edo’s Yoshiwara, such ‘red-light districts’ were seen as symbols of prosperity and modernity. This hints at the commodification of women’s bodies, places to project political values, of which women themselves often denied. Some of the open-plan prints expose brothels’ unique status, as both private and public spaces. But as Yokohama boasts its global and cosmopolitan identity, the European women still seem more restrained and limited by their clothing than their Japanese counterparts.
From maps and plans of the port’s architecture, to woodblock prints (nishiki-e) of play and prostitution, newspaper reports and handwritten letters, diverse media exposes the pleasure district from pluralised perspectives. The archive materials are especially powerful, humanising the women who worked in these places by reference to their cursive handwriting, and calling out ‘prostitute’s apprenticeships’ for what they often were – forms of human trafficking. Above all, we see its status in popular interest and popular culture, and thus why these prints are overrepresented in the historical archives.
Beyond and adjacent to ukiyo-e, women worked too. And Japanese Paintings of Modern Osaka is the model of curation. Using visual art to understand the city’s unique identity, and vice versa, Nakanoshima connects with Osaka’s contemporary culture. And yes, women wearing kimonos get a discount.
A city shaped by commerce, migration, and Chinese influences, Osaka’s particular contribution to Japanese modern art is scarcely acknowledged. In part, it is due to a historic lack of local and regional collections; this exhibition is the first of Osakan nihonga (a technique favouring washing/Japanese paper and silk), and also celebrates the museum’s own one year anniversary.
It’s a history which includes and integrates women, and it’s huge. It begins with the familiar beauties and bijin-ga - Kitano Tsunetomi’s voyeuristic gaze on young girls with lost faces, over-sexualised. A point of access, from which a torrent of works tears up our expectations.
We see a plurality of women, both as represented by men, and as artists in their own right. Much attention is paid to Shima Seien, a pioneering teacher, and one of the ‘three gardens of three cities’ along with Uemura Shoen (Kyoto) and Kunen Ikeda (Tokyo). Other heroes include Hashimoto Seiko, who refused to work to commission in order to depict what she wanted. Ikuta Kacho, who ‘inherited aspects’ of her teacher Suga Tatehiko, whilst ‘actively depicting the customs of her own time’.
Her boundary-pushing hanging scroll of the Tenjin Festival stands out from its contemporaries for its square format, and integration of motifs from China. In the final rooms, every work is a shock, a stark contrast in style and format from that curated next to it. The folding screens with great blank spaces, which focus the attention on their subjects, are a highlight.
Nor does the Nakanoshima languor in hyper-local history; by focusing on legacy – students, education, and the next generation of artists – it looks to the future, and closes with the news of their next exhibition, Definitive Edition! Osaka in the Eyes of Women Painters.
Established in 1914, Osaka’s Hakuyousha School was one of few gender co-educational schools in Japan. This place, where men and women (here, ‘people’) practised together, was one reason artists were drawn to the city – migrations which speak of individual agency.
This cosmopolitanism is embodied by Nakamura Teii’s works, where a woman reads a Japanese magazine, adorned with the image of Marlene Dietrich. She wears both a black kimono, a symbol of Japan, and a black ribbon, of Western Europe. Her very being challenges the binaries of East and West, and womanhood.
Overlaps can be found with KYOCERA’s current display of art from the 1930s, which subtly explores this complex relationship between consumerism, and the liberation or limitation of women. Moga (‘modern girls’) abound; but here, they sometimes seem bored by shopping.
The Fascinating Showa-Modern pays attention to the lived experiences of women in the Taisho-Showa period, and 20th century more widely. We see them enjoying ‘Western pursuits’ like golf, archery, and dog-walking, but also practising as conductors, doctors, and nurses. Less is presented of the umbrella motif – a ‘sadistic’ trope from bijin-ga where women struggle against the wind, and natural environment. More women are waiting at the new Tokyo Train Station, exhausted from a day at work.
Both nihonga and yoga, Japanese and Western artworks, are curated in conversation – still, Japan comes first in the captions, with Western influences othered as ‘additions’, or ‘exotic’. In other self-portraits, the women artists seem to lighten their skin, or emphasise more Western or European facial features, a nod to complex ideas about modernity in post-Meiji Japan; another avenue for future exhibitions about the women of Japanese artworks.
Minatozaki Painted with Flowers of the Floating World is on view at the Yokohama History Museum, Yokohama until 7 May 2023.
Japanese Paintings of Modern Osaka opened at the Nakanoshima Museum of Art, Osaka in 2023, and is currently on view at Tokyo Station Gallery, Tokyo until 11 June 2023.
Collection Room Special Display: The Fascinating Showa-Modern is on view at Kyoto City KYOCERA Museum of Art, Kyoto until 18 June 2023.
Make sure to collect your Yamos on the gowithYamo app with each exhibitionsyou visit!
Woodblock prints in the ukiyo-e ('pictures of the floating world') style are one of many cases where Japanese women are hidden in plain sight. Though omnipresent as subjects and models – bijin-ga (‘beautiful women’ pictures) boomed in the Edo period – they rarely practised as artists.
This isn’t to say they did not contribute to the form in other ways, yet most curation of ukiyo-e in Japan follows this conventional, conservative narrative, focusing on the role of ‘great men’ artists. Take Mitsubishi Ichigokan Museum’s recent blockbuster, Yoshiiku and Yoshitoshi: Ukiyo-e Masters at the Dawn of Modernization, where neither the women subjects, nor the woodblock printers responsible for the vivid colour and accuracy of the works, were much credited. Collectors neither.
They crop up as calendar girls, courtesans, and targets of consumerism. Murasaki Shikibu, the oft-heralded author of The Tale of Genji, appears in Yoshitoshi’s One Hundred Aspects of the Moon series, and another woman as a warrior – but little context is given about them. More nuanced, perhaps, is the curation of those men warriors depicted with ‘feminine’ characteristics.
But smaller institutions are leading the way. At Yokohama History Museum, Minatozaki Painted with Flowers of the Floating World unravels the history of Minatozaki Yukaki, a pleasure district which opened in 1859, the same year as Yokohama City. It’s curated in an intimate spiral, concluding with the voices of women at its centre.
Modelled after Edo’s Yoshiwara, such ‘red-light districts’ were seen as symbols of prosperity and modernity. This hints at the commodification of women’s bodies, places to project political values, of which women themselves often denied. Some of the open-plan prints expose brothels’ unique status, as both private and public spaces. But as Yokohama boasts its global and cosmopolitan identity, the European women still seem more restrained and limited by their clothing than their Japanese counterparts.
From maps and plans of the port’s architecture, to woodblock prints (nishiki-e) of play and prostitution, newspaper reports and handwritten letters, diverse media exposes the pleasure district from pluralised perspectives. The archive materials are especially powerful, humanising the women who worked in these places by reference to their cursive handwriting, and calling out ‘prostitute’s apprenticeships’ for what they often were – forms of human trafficking. Above all, we see its status in popular interest and popular culture, and thus why these prints are overrepresented in the historical archives.
Beyond and adjacent to ukiyo-e, women worked too. And Japanese Paintings of Modern Osaka is the model of curation. Using visual art to understand the city’s unique identity, and vice versa, Nakanoshima connects with Osaka’s contemporary culture. And yes, women wearing kimonos get a discount.
A city shaped by commerce, migration, and Chinese influences, Osaka’s particular contribution to Japanese modern art is scarcely acknowledged. In part, it is due to a historic lack of local and regional collections; this exhibition is the first of Osakan nihonga (a technique favouring washing/Japanese paper and silk), and also celebrates the museum’s own one year anniversary.
It’s a history which includes and integrates women, and it’s huge. It begins with the familiar beauties and bijin-ga - Kitano Tsunetomi’s voyeuristic gaze on young girls with lost faces, over-sexualised. A point of access, from which a torrent of works tears up our expectations.
We see a plurality of women, both as represented by men, and as artists in their own right. Much attention is paid to Shima Seien, a pioneering teacher, and one of the ‘three gardens of three cities’ along with Uemura Shoen (Kyoto) and Kunen Ikeda (Tokyo). Other heroes include Hashimoto Seiko, who refused to work to commission in order to depict what she wanted. Ikuta Kacho, who ‘inherited aspects’ of her teacher Suga Tatehiko, whilst ‘actively depicting the customs of her own time’.
Her boundary-pushing hanging scroll of the Tenjin Festival stands out from its contemporaries for its square format, and integration of motifs from China. In the final rooms, every work is a shock, a stark contrast in style and format from that curated next to it. The folding screens with great blank spaces, which focus the attention on their subjects, are a highlight.
Nor does the Nakanoshima languor in hyper-local history; by focusing on legacy – students, education, and the next generation of artists – it looks to the future, and closes with the news of their next exhibition, Definitive Edition! Osaka in the Eyes of Women Painters.
Established in 1914, Osaka’s Hakuyousha School was one of few gender co-educational schools in Japan. This place, where men and women (here, ‘people’) practised together, was one reason artists were drawn to the city – migrations which speak of individual agency.
This cosmopolitanism is embodied by Nakamura Teii’s works, where a woman reads a Japanese magazine, adorned with the image of Marlene Dietrich. She wears both a black kimono, a symbol of Japan, and a black ribbon, of Western Europe. Her very being challenges the binaries of East and West, and womanhood.
Overlaps can be found with KYOCERA’s current display of art from the 1930s, which subtly explores this complex relationship between consumerism, and the liberation or limitation of women. Moga (‘modern girls’) abound; but here, they sometimes seem bored by shopping.
The Fascinating Showa-Modern pays attention to the lived experiences of women in the Taisho-Showa period, and 20th century more widely. We see them enjoying ‘Western pursuits’ like golf, archery, and dog-walking, but also practising as conductors, doctors, and nurses. Less is presented of the umbrella motif – a ‘sadistic’ trope from bijin-ga where women struggle against the wind, and natural environment. More women are waiting at the new Tokyo Train Station, exhausted from a day at work.
Both nihonga and yoga, Japanese and Western artworks, are curated in conversation – still, Japan comes first in the captions, with Western influences othered as ‘additions’, or ‘exotic’. In other self-portraits, the women artists seem to lighten their skin, or emphasise more Western or European facial features, a nod to complex ideas about modernity in post-Meiji Japan; another avenue for future exhibitions about the women of Japanese artworks.
Minatozaki Painted with Flowers of the Floating World is on view at the Yokohama History Museum, Yokohama until 7 May 2023.
Japanese Paintings of Modern Osaka opened at the Nakanoshima Museum of Art, Osaka in 2023, and is currently on view at Tokyo Station Gallery, Tokyo until 11 June 2023.
Collection Room Special Display: The Fascinating Showa-Modern is on view at Kyoto City KYOCERA Museum of Art, Kyoto until 18 June 2023.
Make sure to collect your Yamos on the gowithYamo app with each exhibitionsyou visit!
Woodblock prints in the ukiyo-e ('pictures of the floating world') style are one of many cases where Japanese women are hidden in plain sight. Though omnipresent as subjects and models – bijin-ga (‘beautiful women’ pictures) boomed in the Edo period – they rarely practised as artists.
This isn’t to say they did not contribute to the form in other ways, yet most curation of ukiyo-e in Japan follows this conventional, conservative narrative, focusing on the role of ‘great men’ artists. Take Mitsubishi Ichigokan Museum’s recent blockbuster, Yoshiiku and Yoshitoshi: Ukiyo-e Masters at the Dawn of Modernization, where neither the women subjects, nor the woodblock printers responsible for the vivid colour and accuracy of the works, were much credited. Collectors neither.
They crop up as calendar girls, courtesans, and targets of consumerism. Murasaki Shikibu, the oft-heralded author of The Tale of Genji, appears in Yoshitoshi’s One Hundred Aspects of the Moon series, and another woman as a warrior – but little context is given about them. More nuanced, perhaps, is the curation of those men warriors depicted with ‘feminine’ characteristics.
But smaller institutions are leading the way. At Yokohama History Museum, Minatozaki Painted with Flowers of the Floating World unravels the history of Minatozaki Yukaki, a pleasure district which opened in 1859, the same year as Yokohama City. It’s curated in an intimate spiral, concluding with the voices of women at its centre.
Modelled after Edo’s Yoshiwara, such ‘red-light districts’ were seen as symbols of prosperity and modernity. This hints at the commodification of women’s bodies, places to project political values, of which women themselves often denied. Some of the open-plan prints expose brothels’ unique status, as both private and public spaces. But as Yokohama boasts its global and cosmopolitan identity, the European women still seem more restrained and limited by their clothing than their Japanese counterparts.
From maps and plans of the port’s architecture, to woodblock prints (nishiki-e) of play and prostitution, newspaper reports and handwritten letters, diverse media exposes the pleasure district from pluralised perspectives. The archive materials are especially powerful, humanising the women who worked in these places by reference to their cursive handwriting, and calling out ‘prostitute’s apprenticeships’ for what they often were – forms of human trafficking. Above all, we see its status in popular interest and popular culture, and thus why these prints are overrepresented in the historical archives.
Beyond and adjacent to ukiyo-e, women worked too. And Japanese Paintings of Modern Osaka is the model of curation. Using visual art to understand the city’s unique identity, and vice versa, Nakanoshima connects with Osaka’s contemporary culture. And yes, women wearing kimonos get a discount.
A city shaped by commerce, migration, and Chinese influences, Osaka’s particular contribution to Japanese modern art is scarcely acknowledged. In part, it is due to a historic lack of local and regional collections; this exhibition is the first of Osakan nihonga (a technique favouring washing/Japanese paper and silk), and also celebrates the museum’s own one year anniversary.
It’s a history which includes and integrates women, and it’s huge. It begins with the familiar beauties and bijin-ga - Kitano Tsunetomi’s voyeuristic gaze on young girls with lost faces, over-sexualised. A point of access, from which a torrent of works tears up our expectations.
We see a plurality of women, both as represented by men, and as artists in their own right. Much attention is paid to Shima Seien, a pioneering teacher, and one of the ‘three gardens of three cities’ along with Uemura Shoen (Kyoto) and Kunen Ikeda (Tokyo). Other heroes include Hashimoto Seiko, who refused to work to commission in order to depict what she wanted. Ikuta Kacho, who ‘inherited aspects’ of her teacher Suga Tatehiko, whilst ‘actively depicting the customs of her own time’.
Her boundary-pushing hanging scroll of the Tenjin Festival stands out from its contemporaries for its square format, and integration of motifs from China. In the final rooms, every work is a shock, a stark contrast in style and format from that curated next to it. The folding screens with great blank spaces, which focus the attention on their subjects, are a highlight.
Nor does the Nakanoshima languor in hyper-local history; by focusing on legacy – students, education, and the next generation of artists – it looks to the future, and closes with the news of their next exhibition, Definitive Edition! Osaka in the Eyes of Women Painters.
Established in 1914, Osaka’s Hakuyousha School was one of few gender co-educational schools in Japan. This place, where men and women (here, ‘people’) practised together, was one reason artists were drawn to the city – migrations which speak of individual agency.
This cosmopolitanism is embodied by Nakamura Teii’s works, where a woman reads a Japanese magazine, adorned with the image of Marlene Dietrich. She wears both a black kimono, a symbol of Japan, and a black ribbon, of Western Europe. Her very being challenges the binaries of East and West, and womanhood.
Overlaps can be found with KYOCERA’s current display of art from the 1930s, which subtly explores this complex relationship between consumerism, and the liberation or limitation of women. Moga (‘modern girls’) abound; but here, they sometimes seem bored by shopping.
The Fascinating Showa-Modern pays attention to the lived experiences of women in the Taisho-Showa period, and 20th century more widely. We see them enjoying ‘Western pursuits’ like golf, archery, and dog-walking, but also practising as conductors, doctors, and nurses. Less is presented of the umbrella motif – a ‘sadistic’ trope from bijin-ga where women struggle against the wind, and natural environment. More women are waiting at the new Tokyo Train Station, exhausted from a day at work.
Both nihonga and yoga, Japanese and Western artworks, are curated in conversation – still, Japan comes first in the captions, with Western influences othered as ‘additions’, or ‘exotic’. In other self-portraits, the women artists seem to lighten their skin, or emphasise more Western or European facial features, a nod to complex ideas about modernity in post-Meiji Japan; another avenue for future exhibitions about the women of Japanese artworks.
Minatozaki Painted with Flowers of the Floating World is on view at the Yokohama History Museum, Yokohama until 7 May 2023.
Japanese Paintings of Modern Osaka opened at the Nakanoshima Museum of Art, Osaka in 2023, and is currently on view at Tokyo Station Gallery, Tokyo until 11 June 2023.
Collection Room Special Display: The Fascinating Showa-Modern is on view at Kyoto City KYOCERA Museum of Art, Kyoto until 18 June 2023.
Make sure to collect your Yamos on the gowithYamo app with each exhibitionsyou visit!
Woodblock prints in the ukiyo-e ('pictures of the floating world') style are one of many cases where Japanese women are hidden in plain sight. Though omnipresent as subjects and models – bijin-ga (‘beautiful women’ pictures) boomed in the Edo period – they rarely practised as artists.
This isn’t to say they did not contribute to the form in other ways, yet most curation of ukiyo-e in Japan follows this conventional, conservative narrative, focusing on the role of ‘great men’ artists. Take Mitsubishi Ichigokan Museum’s recent blockbuster, Yoshiiku and Yoshitoshi: Ukiyo-e Masters at the Dawn of Modernization, where neither the women subjects, nor the woodblock printers responsible for the vivid colour and accuracy of the works, were much credited. Collectors neither.
They crop up as calendar girls, courtesans, and targets of consumerism. Murasaki Shikibu, the oft-heralded author of The Tale of Genji, appears in Yoshitoshi’s One Hundred Aspects of the Moon series, and another woman as a warrior – but little context is given about them. More nuanced, perhaps, is the curation of those men warriors depicted with ‘feminine’ characteristics.
But smaller institutions are leading the way. At Yokohama History Museum, Minatozaki Painted with Flowers of the Floating World unravels the history of Minatozaki Yukaki, a pleasure district which opened in 1859, the same year as Yokohama City. It’s curated in an intimate spiral, concluding with the voices of women at its centre.
Modelled after Edo’s Yoshiwara, such ‘red-light districts’ were seen as symbols of prosperity and modernity. This hints at the commodification of women’s bodies, places to project political values, of which women themselves often denied. Some of the open-plan prints expose brothels’ unique status, as both private and public spaces. But as Yokohama boasts its global and cosmopolitan identity, the European women still seem more restrained and limited by their clothing than their Japanese counterparts.
From maps and plans of the port’s architecture, to woodblock prints (nishiki-e) of play and prostitution, newspaper reports and handwritten letters, diverse media exposes the pleasure district from pluralised perspectives. The archive materials are especially powerful, humanising the women who worked in these places by reference to their cursive handwriting, and calling out ‘prostitute’s apprenticeships’ for what they often were – forms of human trafficking. Above all, we see its status in popular interest and popular culture, and thus why these prints are overrepresented in the historical archives.
Beyond and adjacent to ukiyo-e, women worked too. And Japanese Paintings of Modern Osaka is the model of curation. Using visual art to understand the city’s unique identity, and vice versa, Nakanoshima connects with Osaka’s contemporary culture. And yes, women wearing kimonos get a discount.
A city shaped by commerce, migration, and Chinese influences, Osaka’s particular contribution to Japanese modern art is scarcely acknowledged. In part, it is due to a historic lack of local and regional collections; this exhibition is the first of Osakan nihonga (a technique favouring washing/Japanese paper and silk), and also celebrates the museum’s own one year anniversary.
It’s a history which includes and integrates women, and it’s huge. It begins with the familiar beauties and bijin-ga - Kitano Tsunetomi’s voyeuristic gaze on young girls with lost faces, over-sexualised. A point of access, from which a torrent of works tears up our expectations.
We see a plurality of women, both as represented by men, and as artists in their own right. Much attention is paid to Shima Seien, a pioneering teacher, and one of the ‘three gardens of three cities’ along with Uemura Shoen (Kyoto) and Kunen Ikeda (Tokyo). Other heroes include Hashimoto Seiko, who refused to work to commission in order to depict what she wanted. Ikuta Kacho, who ‘inherited aspects’ of her teacher Suga Tatehiko, whilst ‘actively depicting the customs of her own time’.
Her boundary-pushing hanging scroll of the Tenjin Festival stands out from its contemporaries for its square format, and integration of motifs from China. In the final rooms, every work is a shock, a stark contrast in style and format from that curated next to it. The folding screens with great blank spaces, which focus the attention on their subjects, are a highlight.
Nor does the Nakanoshima languor in hyper-local history; by focusing on legacy – students, education, and the next generation of artists – it looks to the future, and closes with the news of their next exhibition, Definitive Edition! Osaka in the Eyes of Women Painters.
Established in 1914, Osaka’s Hakuyousha School was one of few gender co-educational schools in Japan. This place, where men and women (here, ‘people’) practised together, was one reason artists were drawn to the city – migrations which speak of individual agency.
This cosmopolitanism is embodied by Nakamura Teii’s works, where a woman reads a Japanese magazine, adorned with the image of Marlene Dietrich. She wears both a black kimono, a symbol of Japan, and a black ribbon, of Western Europe. Her very being challenges the binaries of East and West, and womanhood.
Overlaps can be found with KYOCERA’s current display of art from the 1930s, which subtly explores this complex relationship between consumerism, and the liberation or limitation of women. Moga (‘modern girls’) abound; but here, they sometimes seem bored by shopping.
The Fascinating Showa-Modern pays attention to the lived experiences of women in the Taisho-Showa period, and 20th century more widely. We see them enjoying ‘Western pursuits’ like golf, archery, and dog-walking, but also practising as conductors, doctors, and nurses. Less is presented of the umbrella motif – a ‘sadistic’ trope from bijin-ga where women struggle against the wind, and natural environment. More women are waiting at the new Tokyo Train Station, exhausted from a day at work.
Both nihonga and yoga, Japanese and Western artworks, are curated in conversation – still, Japan comes first in the captions, with Western influences othered as ‘additions’, or ‘exotic’. In other self-portraits, the women artists seem to lighten their skin, or emphasise more Western or European facial features, a nod to complex ideas about modernity in post-Meiji Japan; another avenue for future exhibitions about the women of Japanese artworks.
Minatozaki Painted with Flowers of the Floating World is on view at the Yokohama History Museum, Yokohama until 7 May 2023.
Japanese Paintings of Modern Osaka opened at the Nakanoshima Museum of Art, Osaka in 2023, and is currently on view at Tokyo Station Gallery, Tokyo until 11 June 2023.
Collection Room Special Display: The Fascinating Showa-Modern is on view at Kyoto City KYOCERA Museum of Art, Kyoto until 18 June 2023.
Make sure to collect your Yamos on the gowithYamo app with each exhibitionsyou visit!
Woodblock prints in the ukiyo-e ('pictures of the floating world') style are one of many cases where Japanese women are hidden in plain sight. Though omnipresent as subjects and models – bijin-ga (‘beautiful women’ pictures) boomed in the Edo period – they rarely practised as artists.
This isn’t to say they did not contribute to the form in other ways, yet most curation of ukiyo-e in Japan follows this conventional, conservative narrative, focusing on the role of ‘great men’ artists. Take Mitsubishi Ichigokan Museum’s recent blockbuster, Yoshiiku and Yoshitoshi: Ukiyo-e Masters at the Dawn of Modernization, where neither the women subjects, nor the woodblock printers responsible for the vivid colour and accuracy of the works, were much credited. Collectors neither.
They crop up as calendar girls, courtesans, and targets of consumerism. Murasaki Shikibu, the oft-heralded author of The Tale of Genji, appears in Yoshitoshi’s One Hundred Aspects of the Moon series, and another woman as a warrior – but little context is given about them. More nuanced, perhaps, is the curation of those men warriors depicted with ‘feminine’ characteristics.
But smaller institutions are leading the way. At Yokohama History Museum, Minatozaki Painted with Flowers of the Floating World unravels the history of Minatozaki Yukaki, a pleasure district which opened in 1859, the same year as Yokohama City. It’s curated in an intimate spiral, concluding with the voices of women at its centre.
Modelled after Edo’s Yoshiwara, such ‘red-light districts’ were seen as symbols of prosperity and modernity. This hints at the commodification of women’s bodies, places to project political values, of which women themselves often denied. Some of the open-plan prints expose brothels’ unique status, as both private and public spaces. But as Yokohama boasts its global and cosmopolitan identity, the European women still seem more restrained and limited by their clothing than their Japanese counterparts.
From maps and plans of the port’s architecture, to woodblock prints (nishiki-e) of play and prostitution, newspaper reports and handwritten letters, diverse media exposes the pleasure district from pluralised perspectives. The archive materials are especially powerful, humanising the women who worked in these places by reference to their cursive handwriting, and calling out ‘prostitute’s apprenticeships’ for what they often were – forms of human trafficking. Above all, we see its status in popular interest and popular culture, and thus why these prints are overrepresented in the historical archives.
Beyond and adjacent to ukiyo-e, women worked too. And Japanese Paintings of Modern Osaka is the model of curation. Using visual art to understand the city’s unique identity, and vice versa, Nakanoshima connects with Osaka’s contemporary culture. And yes, women wearing kimonos get a discount.
A city shaped by commerce, migration, and Chinese influences, Osaka’s particular contribution to Japanese modern art is scarcely acknowledged. In part, it is due to a historic lack of local and regional collections; this exhibition is the first of Osakan nihonga (a technique favouring washing/Japanese paper and silk), and also celebrates the museum’s own one year anniversary.
It’s a history which includes and integrates women, and it’s huge. It begins with the familiar beauties and bijin-ga - Kitano Tsunetomi’s voyeuristic gaze on young girls with lost faces, over-sexualised. A point of access, from which a torrent of works tears up our expectations.
We see a plurality of women, both as represented by men, and as artists in their own right. Much attention is paid to Shima Seien, a pioneering teacher, and one of the ‘three gardens of three cities’ along with Uemura Shoen (Kyoto) and Kunen Ikeda (Tokyo). Other heroes include Hashimoto Seiko, who refused to work to commission in order to depict what she wanted. Ikuta Kacho, who ‘inherited aspects’ of her teacher Suga Tatehiko, whilst ‘actively depicting the customs of her own time’.
Her boundary-pushing hanging scroll of the Tenjin Festival stands out from its contemporaries for its square format, and integration of motifs from China. In the final rooms, every work is a shock, a stark contrast in style and format from that curated next to it. The folding screens with great blank spaces, which focus the attention on their subjects, are a highlight.
Nor does the Nakanoshima languor in hyper-local history; by focusing on legacy – students, education, and the next generation of artists – it looks to the future, and closes with the news of their next exhibition, Definitive Edition! Osaka in the Eyes of Women Painters.
Established in 1914, Osaka’s Hakuyousha School was one of few gender co-educational schools in Japan. This place, where men and women (here, ‘people’) practised together, was one reason artists were drawn to the city – migrations which speak of individual agency.
This cosmopolitanism is embodied by Nakamura Teii’s works, where a woman reads a Japanese magazine, adorned with the image of Marlene Dietrich. She wears both a black kimono, a symbol of Japan, and a black ribbon, of Western Europe. Her very being challenges the binaries of East and West, and womanhood.
Overlaps can be found with KYOCERA’s current display of art from the 1930s, which subtly explores this complex relationship between consumerism, and the liberation or limitation of women. Moga (‘modern girls’) abound; but here, they sometimes seem bored by shopping.
The Fascinating Showa-Modern pays attention to the lived experiences of women in the Taisho-Showa period, and 20th century more widely. We see them enjoying ‘Western pursuits’ like golf, archery, and dog-walking, but also practising as conductors, doctors, and nurses. Less is presented of the umbrella motif – a ‘sadistic’ trope from bijin-ga where women struggle against the wind, and natural environment. More women are waiting at the new Tokyo Train Station, exhausted from a day at work.
Both nihonga and yoga, Japanese and Western artworks, are curated in conversation – still, Japan comes first in the captions, with Western influences othered as ‘additions’, or ‘exotic’. In other self-portraits, the women artists seem to lighten their skin, or emphasise more Western or European facial features, a nod to complex ideas about modernity in post-Meiji Japan; another avenue for future exhibitions about the women of Japanese artworks.
Minatozaki Painted with Flowers of the Floating World is on view at the Yokohama History Museum, Yokohama until 7 May 2023.
Japanese Paintings of Modern Osaka opened at the Nakanoshima Museum of Art, Osaka in 2023, and is currently on view at Tokyo Station Gallery, Tokyo until 11 June 2023.
Collection Room Special Display: The Fascinating Showa-Modern is on view at Kyoto City KYOCERA Museum of Art, Kyoto until 18 June 2023.
Make sure to collect your Yamos on the gowithYamo app with each exhibitionsyou visit!
