- Convenors:
-
Freya Terryn
(UCLouvain)
Doreen Mueller (Leiden University)
Send message to Convenors
- Discussant:
-
Doreen Mueller
(Leiden University)
- Format:
- Panel
- Section:
- Visual Arts
Short Abstract
This panel examines how practices of augmentation shaped landscape elements as active sites of meaning in Japanese printed media from the Edo period onward. It explores how pictorial quotation, intermedial exchange, and viewing practices generated dynamic visual knowledge.
Long Abstract
Landscape in Japanese printed media is often treated as a neutral backdrop framing figures, narratives, or famous sites. This panel challenges that assumption by foregrounding practices of augmentation as a way to understand how landscape elements were constructed and interpreted. Here, augmentation refers to the ways landscapes were composed, modified, and combined with other visual and textual elements, enabling them to carry meaning beyond their function as settings.
Across three case studies spanning the eighteenth century to the present, the panel demonstrates how landscapes functioned as composite images whose meanings were shaped through specific practices. Central to these practices is pictorial quotation, through which artists drew on earlier prints, illustrated books, and established compositional models to reference, adapt, and layer visual meaning. Intermedial exchange further informed landscape representation, as motifs, spatial conventions, and background elements circulated between single-sheet prints and illustrated books, challenging boundaries between formats. Finally, viewing practices played an equally important role: landscapes invited particular modes of recognition and interpretation, shaped by familiarity with earlier images and shared visual conventions.
By situating these practices within broader contexts of production, circulation, and reception, the panel reframes landscape in Japanese printed media as an active contributor to meaning rather than a passive backdrop. Taken together, the papers propose a shared approach to landscape that emphasizes accumulation, reuse, and interpretation, offering new perspectives on how visual knowledge was produced and transmitted through Japanese prints and books.
| Abstract in Japanese (if needed) |
Accepted papers
Paper short abstract
This paper argues that Hiroshige III’s 1876 series "Nihon chishi ryakuzu" employs pictorial quotation not only from landscape prints and meisho zue but also from state-sponsored educational geography, revealing institutional mediation in Meiji print landscapes.
Paper long abstract
In March 1876, the landscape print series "Sketches of Geographic Locations in Japan" (Nihon chishi ryakuzu 日本地誌略図) was issued. Designed by Utagawa Hiroshige III (1842-1894), the series comprises seventy-four horizontal chūban prints and a title page, marking Hiroshige III’s largest serialized project to date and his first sustained engagement with landscapes spanning multiple regions of Japan.
Depicting Japanese landscapes in the late nineteenth century required artists to mobilize a shared repertoire of compositional devices and visual conventions. In this series, Hiroshige III relied extensively on pictorial quotation (hongadori 本画取り), referencing established designs associated with the Hiroshige lineage—most notably Utagawa Hiroshige (1797-1858) and Utagawa Hiroshige II (1826-1869)—as well as black-and-white line illustrations from woodblock-printed travel guidebooks (meisho zue 名所図会). These sources offered authoritative visual templates for representing notable sites and regional topographies, allowing Hiroshige III to situate his work within a recognizable landscape tradition.
This paper argues, however, that identifying pictorial quotation solely within the domain of artistic precedent is insufficient to account for the composite nature of this series. Building on Julie Nelson Davis’s influential reconceptualization of prints as products of artistic and commercial collaboration, I propose expanding the analytical frame to include institutional networks as formative agents in landscape design. Specifically, I argue that the four-volume illustrated book "Outline of Geographic Locations in Japan" (Nihon chishi ryaku 日本地誌略, 1874)—edited by the Tokyo Teacher Training School and published by the Ministry of Education—served as a canonical visual and textual source for "Nihon chishi ryakuzu".
Through close analysis of shared visual motifs, modes of geographic classification, and representational strategies, this paper demonstrates how Hiroshige III’s landscapes operate as pictorial quotations not only of earlier print and meisho zue models but also of state-sponsored educational media. By foregrounding institutional mediation alongside artistic lineage and commercial publishing, the paper reframes late nineteenth-century print landscapes as composite images that negotiated cultural authority, pedagogical knowledge, and emerging conceptions of national space.
Paper short abstract
Ukiyo-e landscapes re-compose space by negotiating convention, place, and prior image. This paper, on the example of Lake Suwa depictions from sansui templates through Hokusai to Hiroshige III, crowdsources georeferencing data to reveal shifts between inherited pictorial logic and shifting canon.
Paper long abstract
Ukiyo-e (Japanese woodblock prints of the Edo period, 1603–1868) do not document the places of the past—they re-compose spaces by bringing together recognizable landscape features and contextual cues so viewers can identify “where” they are looking. When print designers thematized the same known site across generations, they worked from inherited literary and pictorial conventions, the place itself, and specific earlier prints. This paper traces how the balance between these sources shifted and what kind of looking the prints invited: contemplative distance through empty middle grounds, theatrical encounter with a specific place, or recognition of a picture already known. It draws on Yonemoto’s work on spatial vernaculars and publisher advertisements that marketed geographic specificity and applies computationally enhanced viewing: georeferencing data from the virtual platform Drawing from the Crowd where citizen scientists align prints with 3D terrain models, helps make visible shifting patterns of compositional logic between convention and canonical image.
Depictions of Lake Suwa (Suwa-ko 諏訪湖) offer a revealing case. Early depictions in print drew on sansui (layered mountain-water arrangement) conventions with elevated viewpoints and carefully positioned vegetation as ways of signifying the kind of mountain-and-lake views that early print designers inherited and adapted. Hokusai’s “Lake Suwa in Shinano Province” from the Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji (c. 1830–32) quotes yet transforms this inheritance: a twisted pine dominates the foreground, the lake stretches horizontally, and Fuji floats at a scale no observer could actually see. When Hiroshige III depicted Lake Suwa decades later, he worked from templates that included Hokusai’s pictorial solution—the pine’s position, Fuji’s placement—while still negotiating with actual geography. The quotation layered landscape, convention, and canonical image all at once.
Paper short abstract
Challenging the view that scenic backgrounds in ukiyo-e emerged only with nishiki-e in 1765, this paper examines the intermedial exchange between illustrated books and single-sheet prints, situating the early work of Suzuki Harunobu (1725?–1770) within broader ukiyo-e developments since the 1740s.
Paper long abstract
It is commonly assumed that scenic backgrounds in ukiyo-e single-sheet prints emerged only with the onset of Suzuki Harunobu’s (1725?–1770) multicolour prints (nishiki-e 錦絵), which he began publishing in 1765. However, Harunobu had already utilised intricately detailed background compositions in the reduced-colour prints (benizuri-e 紅摺絵) with which he made his debut in 1760. In these compositions, he could draw not only on developments in single-sheet print design that began in the 1740s, but also on his gradually increasing expertise in designing illustrated books (ehon 絵本), in which backgrounds are integral elements that span the divide between double-page spread (mihiraki 見開き) compositions.
This cross-fertilisation between single-sheet prints and ehon is frequently overlooked, as much of ukiyo-e scholarship tends to treat both media independently. Moreover, interpretations of ukiyo-e often focus on the depicted figures and literary allusions within the compositions while bypassing the backgrounds despite their significance for the narrative quality of the final design. As a consequence, Harunobu’s attention to detail in his nishiki-e is commonly highlighted as a revolutionary invention that became possible with the introduction of full-colour printing in 1765, rather than being recognised as resulting from the first five years of his career, during which he created numerous single-sheet prints and five ehon.
To illuminate how Harunobu created his background designs and gradually increased his compositional craftsmanship, this paper introduces an early composition which he published in the first month of 1761, i.e. just six months after his debut. It will thus become evident how such designs helped him attract the attention of commercial publishers and how he established himself in the competitive print market.