Dulwich Picture Gallery Presents 'Yoshida: Three Generations of Japanese Printmaking'
Japanese woodblock prints have been the water in which artistic imagination has swum, providing sustenance for creativity throughout the 20th Century in Japan and beyond. Amongst the long woodblock tradition, Hiroshi Yoshida and his descendants left an indelible impression on the art form by preserving the tradition and reconciling it with modernity. Yet, their prints are generally overlooked outside Japan, making Dulwich Picture Gallery’s current exhibition of the Yoshida dynasty’s artworks the first of its kind in Europe. Set in the world’s oldest purpose-built public gallery, this lovingly curated exhibition brings three generations of Yoshida’s artworks to a much-deserved forefront.
The story of the Yoshida dynasty begins at a crossroads. Hiroshi Yoshida (1876-1950), who was the patriarch of the dynasty, blended the Japanese woodblock tradition with Western Impressionism. Initially a Western-style painter, Hiroshi shifted to woodblock, printing in his 40s after his travels as a painter opened his eyes to the popular reception of the Japanese art form overseas. His efforts to blend cultures aligned with a general departure from traditional Ukiyo-e printing. Traditionally, in the 17th-century Edo period, the centrality of townspeople’s culture was documented by Ukiyo-e prints, which translates to “pictures of the floating world.” Hedonistic prints of metropolis life were in vogue, whilst landscape prints also enjoyed steady popularity in the thriving industry. When Japan opened their gates to the West during the 19th-century Meiji Restoration, the foundation of woodblock printing developed through a unique fusion with Western art, as exemplified by Hiroshi’s prints. In turn, Japanese prints influenced the development of Impressionism and the Art Nouveau movement.
Upon entry, visitors to the exhibition are graced by scenic landscape prints from Hiroshi’s travels all around the world; we can enjoy his sensitive use of colour, mastery of composition, and delicate painterly precision. Hiroshi’s artistic process cross-pollinated overseas landscapes with Japanese perspectives and techniques, best exemplified by the 3 prints of the Taj Mahal in the exhibition from morning, day, and night. In doing so, he harked back to his Edo predecessors who would print the same landscape at different times of the day. When viewing the print in real life, the subtleties of light and colour become something provocative, like the tangible sense of a quiet morning to the wide-ranging hues of day into night. These nuances owe to Hiroshi’s overwhelming painterly quality which resurfaces in his prints like the use of grey suggestive outlines that don’t choose what the viewer should see, much like how French Impressionism focuses on the how over the what.
The exhibition displays Hiroshi’s own tools, which allows visitors to envision the step-by-step process that allowed the prints to be a fully-fledged entity. Despite the fact that the prints are flat and two-dimensional, Hiroshi’s virtuosic technique makes the natural landscapes take on a physical dimension, from the dry texture of the air to the quality of translucence. Notably, his close involvement in the material production of his prints went beyond the traditional division of labour in Ukiyo-e period, hence allowing more creative freedom and reconciling the woodblock tradition with modernity. His intricate craftsmanship and vision are exemplified in a large-scale print of cherry blossoms entitled “Kumoi Cherry Trees,” which is part of Hiroshi’s domestic prints of Japan in the 1930s. Despite the large format that combined 3 woodblocks, the lack of change in colouring, no matter how hard you look, is a testament to how it is printed to perfection.
To their discredit, Hiroshi’s prints have been accused of patriotism because, during his time as an artist, Japan established a powerful empire under a quasi-fascist military regime. Given that art cannot come from a vacuum, Hiroshi’s beguiling prints of Japanese temples and nature, for all their idyllic compositions and symphonies of colour, are susceptible to being interpreted as assertions of cultural identity and spiritual conservatism. This raises the polarising question: where is the line between an artist during fascism and a fascist artist? On one hand, artists under a regime are vacuous vessels for propaganda, whilst, on the other hand, they can be separated from politics in a transcendental manner — the latter is understandably what people want to believe. The exhibition was strangely quiet about the context of the artworks apart from the Yoshida family’s bubble, steering visitors away from the pervasive realities of dictatorship, nationalism and war. Regardless of where Hiroshi’s loyalties lay, the exhibition’s approach to having nothing to declare about Japan’s imperial history is as mutually exclusive as criticisms that accuse Hiroshi of being a fascist propagandist. Ultimately, there are many profound works of art that are fueled by disturbing ideas, and we can still deeply love and appreciate them even though we don’t agree with them.
The exhibition continues to focus on different members of the Yoshida dynasty, tracing the changes and continuities throughout their rich artistic lineage. The second generation of sons brought post-war abstraction to the Japanese printmaking process to add moments of freshness and conviction. The dreamy hues of Hiroshi Yoshida’s naturalistic views take on a deeper contrast in Tōshi Yoshida’s natural landscapes of Arizona and Utah. Rocky mountains and valleys transform into abstract and astral shapes that resemble sci-fi monoliths. The serenity of Hiroshi’s prints is lost somewhere along the way in the intensity of Hodaka Yoshida’s prints, which beam with a sportive spirit to react against tradition. In an interesting confrontation with modernity, Hodaka develops a new graphic vocabulary by implementing techniques like pop art and collage.
Each generation followed its predecessor's footsteps whilst adding a unique print to the woodblock tradition, as embodied by the current incumbent of the dynasty Ayomi Yoshida (1958-). Ayomi created a site-specific installation for the exhibition at the Dulwich Picture Gallery— the very same gallery where her grandfather Hiroshi Yoshida had visited during his travels as a painter in 1900. In honour of this, the exhibition begins with a display of the museum’s visitor book with his signature and ends with Ayomi’s installation in a tender full circle. Entitled “Transient Beauty,” the installation was inspired by Ayomi’s encounter with her grandfather’s famous artwork of cherry blossoms. Thus, Ayomi’s installation is braided in her cultural DNA, by paying homage to the print tradition and continuing the tangible sense of seasons in her grandfather’s print. But in going beyond the sheet of paper and onto the panoramic walls of the installation, she transcends her predecessor’s legacy. Most importantly, Ayomi reflects the contemporary moment in her installation, by expressing her pressing concern towards environmental issues.
There’s a beauty we come across rarely that is like something that happened elsewhere far away, in a memory, or in heaven. The beauty in Hiroshi’s artwork of the cherry blossoms conjures a vague and regretful longing when considering the world’s imminent extinction, and Ayomi seems to comment on this in “Transient Beauty.” Given that the beautiful 10-day cherry blossom “front” in Japan is already blooming at irregular times, it’s possible that the annual Japanese tradition of “Hanami” where people watch cherry blossoms whilst eating sweets could fade into oblivion. The cherished seasons of Japan and the world alike are being knocked out of kilter. In the face of it all, we may ask ourselves whether art is frivolous. Maybe art can be the stimulus to register the severity of the crisis in our imagination and rebuild the breakdown of the human community for future generations. And the dialogue across generations which is put to the forefront in this exhibition is just one of the ways in which art can hold the world together through compassion.
See the exhibition at Dulwich Picture Gallery, London until 3rd November 2024.
Edited by Oisín McGilloway, Editor-in-Chief
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