Sumida Hokusai Museum in Tokyo Hold Ukiyo-e Exhibition, December 15, 2022 - February 26, 2023.

2022/12/2 18:00

December 2nd,2022

TOKYO, The Sumida Hokusai Museum

Japanese Art Ukiyo-e

Hokusai at Play with the 100 Poems!

The Sumida Hokusai Museum in Tokyo will hold Ukiyo-e (woodblock prints) exhibition, Hokusai at Play with the 100 Poems, December 15, 2022 - February 26, 2023. This exhibition focuses on Hokusai’s One Hundred Poems Explained by a Nurse, joined by a wide range of other ukiyo-e works of art related to One Hundred Poets, One Hundred Poems, in introducing that anthology. You will enjoy these works, in which the powers of One Hundred Poets, One Hundred Poems and of Hokusai cross-fertilize and multiply.

Exhibition Highlights

▶ Hokusai’s last series in the oban nishiki-e format, One Hundred Poems Explained by a Nurse.

* Oban nishiki-e (“Brocade pictures”): large format of multicolor woodblock prints

The Sumida Hokusai Museum's collection of One Hundred Poems Explained by a Nurse series will be exhibited with twenty-three paintings in the first and second halves of this exhibition！ Around 1835, plans were made for a series of prints, One Hundred Poems Explained by a Nurse. In what became Hokusai’s last series in the oban nishiki-e format, twenty-seven prints were published. The difficulty of interpreting the pictures Hokusai created for the series, among other reasons, led to only twenty-seven of the planned one hundred prints being published.　

Katsushika Hokusai, Ono no Komachi, from the series One Hundred Poems Explained by a Nurse, The Sumida Hokusai Museum (1st term)

Exhibition Overview

One Hundred Poets, One Hundred Poems, an anthology of waka poems complied in the thirteenth century, had become a standard part of general education by the mid-Edo period. Moreover, those wakas (“Japanese poem”) share the same format as the satirical kyoka poems then popular and also share their use of parodies and analogies; those similarities helped the anthology gain even greater presence in that period. That social context inspired the idea of creating pictorial explanations of the poems in a way that anyone could understand. The result was Hokusai’s One Hundred Poems Explained by a Nurse, his last series in the oban nishiki-e format. Hokusai, expressing his unique worldview, had included his own ideas in these prints as well as the usual traditions about the poems and poets and the conventional images associated with them.

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Hokusai at Play with the 100 Poems

Official ExhibitionWebsite:https://hokusai-museum.jp/100PoemsEN/

Term: December 15, 2022 - February 26, 2023

　　　First-term: Dec 15, 2022 - Jan 22, 2023

　　　Second-term: Jan 24, 2023 - Feb 26, 2023

Open：Tuesday - Sunday 9:30-17:30（Last admission 17:00）

Closed: Mondays

New Year holidays: December 29 - January 1

　　　 *Open: Mon,Jan 2 / Tue,Jan 3 / Mon,Jan 9, 2023

　　　 *Closed: Wed,Jan 4 / Tue,Jan 10, 2023

Organizers: Sumida City, The Sumida Hokusai Museum