Paper short abstract:

This paper investigates the historical and geographical accuracy of ukiyo-e landscape prints produced the nineteenth century. It focuses on the tendency to curate topography and environmental history tracing the processes of remediation of the artistic idiom of meisho-e at the time.

Paper long abstract:

Japanese early modern printed culture at the turn of the nineteenth century saw a flourish of landscape images, often directly or indirectly labeled meisho-e (images of famous places). This trend only intensified in the 1830s with the print series designed by Katsushika Hokusai (1760-1849) and Utagawa Hiroshige (1797-1858) effectively linking ukiyo, the world of commoner entertainment, with elite arts and court poetry that saw meisho as utamakura (lit. poem pillows), poetic rhetorical figures that tie seasonal images with particular places (Kamens, 1997) regularly visualized in diverse mediums.

Interestingly, rather than poetic expressions, landscape prints demonstrate an emerging proto-scientific understanding of Japan’s natural and cultural geography (i.e. by also featuring mei no nai or ‘anonymous’ places), and its representation, for example, by introducing (hybridized) Western linear perspective and realism that identifies looking with scientific objectivity. However, these new visual trends did not enhance the historical and geographical accuracy of landscape prints as indicated by a notable tendency in prints to curate topography as well as the curious invisibility of extreme weather events and their disastrous impact on the environment and society at the time.

These phenomena not only call into question the representational paradigm of art but also bring into the focus the processes of remediation (Bolter and Grusin 2000), exposing the role of earlier aesthetic principles in facilitating artistic innovation, and challenging the modernist myth of ‘the new’ as a sole agent of aesthetic change.