The woodblock print, a traditional form of Japanese art, has evolved significantly since before the Meiji era.\u00a0 With the introduction of Western ideas and practices, Japanese artists started changing the way they made art.\u00a0 Gradually, influence became assimilated, and the tradition combined with the new.\u00a0 Yoshida Hodaka, a modern Japanese woodblock printer, used Western ideas with a traditional medium, combining the two disciplines like many of his predecessors before him.\u00a0 The commingling of traditional and Occidental art began when Japan first encountered Westerners and still continues today.<\/p>\n
Even before the Meiji Restoration brought an official westernization to the shores of Japan, Western art began influencing Japanese painters and woodblock printers alike.\u00a0 The Genroku era (1688-1704) birthed the learning known as rangaku<\/em>, or \u201cDutch Studies.\u201d\u00a0 The Dutch traders at Nagasaki brought with them European writings of science and medicine, of which the government encouraged the study.\u00a0 Hiraga Gennai (1726-1779) was one of the first to experiment with Western art techniques, founding a local school in Western art.\u00a0 Individual Japanese artists dealt with the introduction of Western ideas differently.\u00a0 In general, there were three types of artists who accepted them: the Occidental type, Reformist type, and Individual type.\u00a0 Shiba Kokan (1738-1848), inspired by Gennai, was an artist-scientist of the first type.\u00a0 His work emphasized pure realism and the practical aspects of painting, criticizing traditional art as \u201cfrivolous.\u201d\u00a0 Maruyama Okyo (1733-1795) represented the Reformist type.\u00a0 This type fused Western ideas with traditional art in attempts to improve the latter.\u00a0 Okyo endeavored to make Western realism appeal to Japanese people in his megane-e<\/em>, or \u201ceyeglass pictures,\u201d on traditional woodblock prints.\u00a0 The third type, represented by Katsushika Hokusai (1760-1849), is the Individualist type.\u00a0 Hokusai experimented with western realism and created a unique Japanese style of his own.\u00a0 Of these, the Reformist thought seemed to permeate throughout the development of Japanese woodblock prints (Kawakita 12-31).<\/p>\n As David Kung, in his book The Contemporary Artist in Japan<\/em> says, \u201cIt is no exaggeration to say that there has been more turbulence and rapid change in the course of Japanese art over the past hundred years than in all the previous centuries combined.\u201d\u00a0 The Meiji Restoration of 1868 brought with it a multitude of Western influence.\u00a0 As a result, two different disciplines of painting emerged: nihonga<\/em>, traditional Japanese painting, and yoga<\/em>, Western-style painting.\u00a0 Like the Reformists before them, many artists attempted to bridge the two styles together.\u00a0 Ishii Hakutei (1882-1958), a Western-style painter, made a woodblock print series called Tokyo Junikei <\/em>(twelve views of Tokyo), featuring geisha with Tokyo in the background.\u00a0 His series attempts to unite Western realism with traditional decorative prints (Hamanaka 13).<\/p>\n The traditional ukiyo-e<\/em> (pictures of the floating world) print movement lost momentum around 1912 due to the influx of Western influence.\u00a0 In its wake, the shin hanga<\/em> (new print) and sosaku hanga<\/em> (creative prints) movements emerged.\u00a0 The former emphasized traditional style, including dividing the parts of the printing process among multiple artists.\u00a0 The latter, heavily influenced by western individualistic ideas, emphasized the centrality of the artist, and called for him to do all parts of the printing process (\u201cJapanese Prints\u201d).\u00a0 Then in 1915, there was an ukiyo-e<\/em> revival movement (Hamanaka 14).\u00a0 The movement proposed the making of art for art\u2019s sake; no longer were prints made to represent real life, since photographs replaced that need.\u00a0 Started by Tokyo publisher Watanabe Shozaburo (1885-1962), the movement responded to the western market\u2019s interest in ukiyo-e<\/em>.\u00a0 To demonstrate its significance and the difference between this new art form and the lesser nishiki-e<\/em>, the prints were produced at a higher quality (Hamanaka 14).<\/p>\n Modern Japanese art traces its origins to the West, yet experienced the new movements in a milder manner.\u00a0 As we reach the modern age, the distance between Asia and the West lessens; today, artists experience the same or similar issues and movements in Japan that they do in the West.\u00a0 However, the surrealist movement in Japan ran much shorter than its Western counterpart.\u00a0 Abstractionism was not a shocking idea to the Japanese people because abstract elements of geometric patterns occur in everyday Japanese living; the patterns of the tatami<\/em> mats and the paper shoji<\/em> screens are examples.\u00a0 Artists such as Takeo Yamaguchi, Toshinobu Onosato, and Jiro Yoshihara, who founded the active post-war avant-garde Gutai<\/em> movement, focused their work on geometric abstraction (Kung 22).<\/p>\n Since ancient times, Japan has borrowed cultural ideas from other countries and assimilated with or added them to their own.\u00a0 The same is true for western influence. Traditional Japanese style co-exists with a more western style in today\u2019s Japanese art as much as it did when western ideas were first introduced to Japan.\u00a0 Some modern Japanese artists feel that they need to return to their traditional roots in order to establish themselves and find artistic identity, while others feel they must emulate western style or they will not be able to compete with Western artists (Kung 29).\u00a0 Still others believe that Japanese have a unique control of both Oriental and Occidental styles and should take advantage of this.\u00a0 Yoshida Hodaka, like many before him, chose to follow the latter path.\u00a0 He uses a traditional Japanese medium of woodblock printing to express his unique modern abstractionism and synthesis of ideas from around the world.\u00a0 In Mexico, the primitive life power that he saw in the Mayan art inspired him, and later in a Pop Art exhibition in New York City, he was again inspired to create his own unique Japanese interpretation.\u00a0 Artists like Yoshida Hodaka choose to use the Western influence that has permeated Japanese art history to create an assimilated style that combines the Occidental with the Oriental.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Hamanaka, Shinji and Amy Reigle Newland.\u00a0 The Female Image: 20th Century Prints of Japanese Beauties.<\/em>\u00a0 Leiden: Hotei Publishing, 2000.<\/p>\n \u201cJapanese Woodblock Prints.\u201d\u00a0 Asia-Art.net.\u00a0 27 April 2006.\u00a0 <www.asia-art.net\/Japan_prints.html>.<\/p>\n Kamakita, Michiaki.\u00a0 Modern Currents in Japanese Art.<\/em>\u00a0 New York: Weatherhill, 1974.<\/p>\n Kung, David.\u00a0 The Contemporary Artist in Japan.<\/em>\u00a0 Honolulu: East-West Center Press, 1966.<\/p>\n Disclaimer<\/em><\/span><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Western Encounter: The Transformation of Japanese Art The woodblock print, a traditional form of Japanese art, has evolved significantly since before the Meiji era.\u00a0 With the introduction of Western ideas and practices, Japanese artists started changing the way they made art.\u00a0 Gradually, influence became assimilated, and the tradition combined with the new.\u00a0 Yoshida Hodaka, a … Continue reading “Heather D’Evelyn”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":261,"featured_media":0,"parent":390,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","template":"page-full_width.php","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-532","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pages.stolaf.edu\/kucera\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/532","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pages.stolaf.edu\/kucera\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pages.stolaf.edu\/kucera\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pages.stolaf.edu\/kucera\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/261"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pages.stolaf.edu\/kucera\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=532"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/pages.stolaf.edu\/kucera\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/532\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":624,"href":"https:\/\/pages.stolaf.edu\/kucera\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/532\/revisions\/624"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pages.stolaf.edu\/kucera\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/390"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pages.stolaf.edu\/kucera\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=532"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Works Cited<\/h4>\n
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