The Influence of Suzhou’s Taohuawu New-Year Prints

This paper is about New-Year woodcut prints done in the Taohuawu area of Suzhou in the Chinese Ming and Qing periods that influenced Edo period ukiyo-e. And Japanese ukiyo-e impacted Western Post-Impressionism. The subject matters of Taohuawu en gravings came from Chinese folk life, and were highly decorative. The engravings were reasonably inexpensive for ordinary people. This art form influenced ukiyo-e directly. As a Japanese engraving expert wrote: "Chinese prints were a good model for Japanese engravings. Chi nese New-Year engravings moved Japanese ukiyo-e artists so much that the new idea of ukiyo-e was influenced largely by them." [1]     

空寂与乡愁的预感——日本浮世绘风景画大师歌川广重

浮世绘是日本江户时代（1603—1867）流行的风俗画,作为最具代表性的日本美术样式,其独特的风格、特征,充分体现了日本的民族个性和所蕴涵的日本式审美思维。其中,浮世绘风景画大师歌川广重的作品如《东海道五十三次》系列、《木曾海道六十九次》、《名所江户百景》系列等,不仅体现出西方绘画的影响,更是在日本传统美术样式与风格的继承中形成了独具一格、颇为哀婉的情怀,透出一份闲寂与乡愁的预感。     

Katsushika Hokusai and a Poetics of Nostalgia

Abstract

This article addresses the activation of aesthetics through the examination of an acute sensitivity to melancholy and time permeating the literary and pictorial arts of Japan. In medieval court circles, this sensitivity was activated through a pervasive sense of aware, a poignant reflection on the pathos of things. This sensibility became the motivating force for court verse, and through this medium, for the mature projects of the ukiyo-e ‘floating world picture’ artist Katsushika Hokusai. Hokusai reached back to aware sensibilities, subjects and conventions in celebrations of the poetic that sustained cultural memories resonating classical lyric and pastoral themes. This paper examines how this elegiac sensibility activated Hokusai’s preoccupations with poetic allusion in his late representations of scholar-poets and the unfinished series of Hyakunin isshu uba-ga etoki, ‘One hundred poems, by one hundred poets, explained by the nurse’. It examines four works to explain how their synthesis of the visual and poetic could sustain aware themes and tropes over time to maintain a distinctive sense of this aesthetic sensibility in Japan.