Sukiya-bashi Police Box (One Hundred Views of Tokyo, Message to the 21st Century 東京百景 21世紀へのメッセジ)
- Date:
- 1989-99
- Medium:
- Woodblock print combination zinc plate and woodcut on paper
- Source:
Sukiya-bashi Police Box, from the series One Hundred Views of Tokyo: Message to the 21st Century, is a 1989 woodblock and photo-transfer print by Hodaka Yoshida (1926-1995) held by the Art Institute of Chicago. The series title is a deliberate, knowing reference to the great nineteenth-century [ukiyo-e](/glossary/ukiyo-e) topographic projects - most obviously Hiroshige's celebrated One Hundred Famous Views of Edo - but Hodaka recast the genre for the end of the Showa era, replacing temple precincts and famous bridges with the actual furniture of late-twentieth-century Tokyo: police boxes, traffic lights, station entrances, signage. Sukiya-bashi is a real intersection in Ginza, and the small [koban](/glossary/koban) (police box) Hodaka depicts is the kind of municipal building that anchored neighborhoods across the capital. By 1989 Hodaka had decades of experience integrating woodblock printing with photographic transfer techniques, and this series represents the culmination of his [sosaku-hanga](/glossary/sosaku-hanga) practice: every block was conceived and worked by the artist himself, in keeping with the creative-print movement's insistence on the unified artist-craftsman. Within the broader Yoshida family arc, Hodaka's late Tokyo prints are particularly significant because they retain the topographic ambition that runs through three generations of the family's work - from Hiroshi's mountains to Toshi's animals and abstractions to Hodaka's urban inventories - while staking a claim that the modern city, with its anonymous concrete architecture, is the rightful subject of late-twentieth-century Japanese printmaking. The Art Institute's holdings of this 1989 sheet anchor the series for English-language scholarship and collectors.
Curated cross-cuts that include this print.
Sukiya-bashi Police Box (One Hundred Views of Tokyo, Message to the 21st Century 東京百景 21世紀へのメッセジ) was created by Hodaka Yoshida (吉田穂高) in 1989-99.
