- Convenors:
-
Maria Puzyreva
(University of Pennsylvania and Rijksmuseum)
Jim Dwinger
Nicholas Purgett (University of Pennsylvania)
Send message to Convenors
- Discussant:
-
Julie Nelson Davis
(University of Pennsylvania)
- Format:
- Panel
- Section:
- Visual Arts
Short Abstract
This panel examines the material dimensions of Japanese printmaking, extending beyond the woodblock. Addressing Edo-period paper production, copperplate printing, and twentieth-century avant-garde techniques, it foregrounds innovation and experimentation inherent in the printing process.
Long Abstract
From ukiyo-e to modern prints, scholars have continued to privilege xylography as the operative mode of Japanese printmaking. While well-founded, this emphasis on the woodblock has come at the expense of a more nuanced approach that foregrounds the diversity of printing materials and methods practiced across a broader geographic and temporal span in the Japanese archipelago.
Across three papers, this panel interrogates the interpretive possibilities that emerge from decentering, rather than displacing, the woodblock in narratives of Japanese print. In doing so, we think outside the blocks. We explore how the paper substrates for ukiyo-e prints, copperplate printing, and experimentation with new technologies in the twentieth century challenge the primacy of the woodblock as the sole interpretive locus in Japanese print studies. The first paper discusses the interconnections between urban publishers and the provincial paper industry. Studying prints from the perspective of their material properties, such as format, not only exposes gaps in our knowledge but also resituates the place of publishers in the greater premodern trade network. Another paper explores the Rangaku artist Shiba Kōkan’s material substitutions necessary to create western-style etchings in Japan. Investigating how issues such as biting the copperplate and printing the image required clever reworkings of existing technologies found in Edo reframes his etchings as innovative rather than imitative. The panel concludes with a paper exploring how Japanese artists’ involvement in international artistic networks in the twentieth century prompted experimentation with new printing techniques, including linocut and lithography.
Bringing together Japanese print scholars working across periods and media, this panel proposes a methodological shift that foregrounds material and technological plurality. By attending to methods and processes that both complemented and existed alongside xylography, it argues for a more capacious framework for understanding the diachronic multiplicity of Japan’s print cultures.
| Abstract in Japanese (if needed) |
Accepted papers
Paper short abstract
Scholars of Shiba Kōkan have framed his work as Edo-period “Westernization” treating prints as passive reflections. Revisiting his 1780s megane-e, I read them as documents of making: substitutions, misreadings, and failures that expose negotiation between foreign imitation and local modes of making.
Paper long abstract
Scholars of Shiba Kōkan (1747–1818) have long focused on his iconographic sources and the transmission of European visual models into Japan, framing his work as a symptom of Edo-period “Westernization.” This approach often treats his prints as passive reflections of imported techniques rather than as active experiments in material translation. Revisiting Kōkan’s 1780s megane-e, etchings designed for optical viewers, I situate them instead as documents of making. Drawing on close analysis of Kōkan’s View of Mimeguri Shrine and Ryōgoku Bridge, as well as his cited Dutch sources such as Egbert Buys’s Nieuw en volkomen woordenboek van konsten en weetenschappen and Noël Chomel’s Dictionnaire Économique, I reconstruct the technical and chemical improvisations through which Kōkan reverse-engineered etching in a Japanese context. His substitutions of materials, his misreadings, and even the visible failures of the mordant become legible as records of process. I argue that these flawed and distorted images are not failed copies of European models but negotiations that expose the friction between foreign imitation and locally available modes of making in Edo visual culture. Reading Kōkan’s prints as experiments in material and chemical mediation allows us to move beyond the teleology of realism and instead understand them as sites where craft knowledge, such as oil pressing, lacquer art, and optique making, converged with the publisher’s penchant for novelty to produce a new class of image.
Paper short abstract
What can the material properties of woodblock prints tell us about their production? This talk examines the relation between print formats and the premodern paper industry, exposing the gaps in our knowledge of publishing practices and situating the publisher as part of a greater trade network.
Paper long abstract
In premodern Japan, the print industry reached unprecedented heights, with hundreds of publishers operating in the metropoles by the 19th century. The sheer amount of printed matter produced during this period – from books and large series of standalone prints to ephemera such as toys and packaging – indicates a steady supply of materials. As the industry grew, printmakers began to employ an economizing system of paper formats, allowing them to increase both output and profit. This required coordination with the provincial manufacturers scattered across Japan, who belonged to two separate yet intertwining industries: paper and wood. These two industrial and agricultural sectors are relatively understudied in the field of ukiyo-e studies, even though they formed the backbone of the print industry. For example, while it is possible to roughly map the regions that produced paper potentially used by publishers, it is still unknown how exactly the publishers acquired their supply. A study of the material properties of prints, rather than their subject matter, such as the economizing format system used by publishers, can provide new answers. A comparison of the types of paper described in Shifu (Notes on Paper, 1777) and printmaker Keisai Eisen’s (1790–1840) comments on printing paper and formats in Zoku ukiyo-e ruikō (Various Thoughts on Floating World Pictures, Continued, c. 1833) reveals that Eisen and contemporaries began to use paper from an entirely different region than their predecessors, signifying a large economic shift in the industry. I show how a renewed focus on materiality exposes our relative lack of attention to and knowledge of this topic, yet may also lead to new insights into the practices of premodern printmakers. What can we learn when we approach the publishing world not as an isolated urban phenomenon, but as part of a larger countrywide trade network?
Paper short abstract
Examining the development of linocut and lithography in early twentieth-century Japan, this paper traces their emergence through international exchange. It argues that these techniques functioned as politically charged material choices for negotiating artistic ideologies and hierarchies.
Paper long abstract
Modern Japanese printmaking was characterized by considerable technical diversity. Nevertheless, scholarly attention has long privileged the woodblock, seen as the most “authentically Japanese” mode of expression. This paper shifts the focus to non-woodblock printing techniques such as linocut and lithography, which entered Japanese print practice in the early twentieth century through international artistic exchange. By examining networks of exhibition, circulation, and collaboration, it contends that the adoption of these technical innovations constituted a deliberate material choice, one that signaled artists’ positions within debates over art and politics.
The paper traces a series of encounters through which linocut and lithography entered and developed within Japanese printmaking. In 1920, Pavel Liubarsky’s linocuts made their way from Russian Far East to Japan as part of David Burliuk and Viktor Palmov’s Futurist touring exhibition. The medium’s relative technical simplicity, emphasis on direct carving, and association with leftist thought resonated with Japanese artists such as Ono Tadashige and Okada Tatsuo, for whom linocut offered both a practical and ideological alternative to mainstream print production. A second formative moment followed in 1922 with the arrival of Varvara Bubnova, who worked in both linocut and lithography and introduced the idea of lithography as an artistic medium to Japanese artistic circles. The paper concludes with a brief discussion of the postwar development of lithography through the American printer Arthur Flory’s year-long lithographic workshop in Tokyo, considering both its pedagogical framework and its diplomatic significance.
By foregrounding linocut and lithography as sites of technical experimentation and political positioning, this paper complicates prevailing narratives that privilege woodblock printmaking. Attending to material processes and their transnational transmission reveals how printing techniques functioned as tools for negotiating artistic ideologies and hierarchies.