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Asakusa ~ Gateway To The Floating World (2019), Theory & History Of Art & Design Department, Elena Varshavskaya (H791 Instructor)

Ukiyo-e Prints Course | Exhibition Catalogs

"Asakusa, a bustling district of Japan’s capital, emerged as a heart of city life during the Edo period (1603-1868). Its popularity continued after Edo was renamed Tokyo in 1868 soon after the beginning of the Meiji era. ...

Thus, Asakusa came to function as a physical and metaphorical path to and site of ukiyo – ‘the floating world,’ an Edo period term, referring to the modern habits and aspirations of townspeople. The notion of ukiyo embraced the lifestyle of city dwellers, their pleasure-seeking, vanity and devotion, intellectual sophistication and playfulness. All this was captured with remarkable exactitude in the ‘pictures …

Boating In The Floating World: Ukiyo-E Prints (2018), Theory & History Of Art & Design Department, Elena Varshavskaya (H791 Instructor)

Ukiyo-e Prints Course | Exhibition Catalogs

"The student-curated exhibition “Boating in the Floating World” focuses on images of boats in ukiyo-e prints as represented in some works from the collection of the RISD Museum. Boats were occasionally depicted in the 18th century celebrity-focused figurative genres. Fairly often they appeared in bijinga – images of beauties, rarely in yakusha-e – portraits of kabuki theater actors, sometimes in compositions derived from literature, history or lore. Nautical motifs became much more pronounced from 1830s with the powerful upsurge of the landscape genre that is believed to have been triggered by the increasingly available Berlin blue – a non-fugitive artificial …