Shôji (Sliding Doors of Katsura Imperial Villa)

This Japanese woodblock print by Hodo Nishimura, 'Shoji (Sliding Doors of Katsura Imperial Villa),' is held in the collection of the Art Institute of Chicago. Katsura Imperial Villa is a seventeenth-century retreat on the outskirts of Kyoto, originally constructed for Prince Toshihito of the Hachijo branch of the imperial family and expanded by his son Toshitada. By the twentieth century it had become one of the most influential reference points in Japanese architecture, repeatedly held up as the canonical expression of sukiya-style design, in which modular tatami rooms, post-and-beam construction, and a refined use of natural materials were combined with garden views framed by sliding paper doors. Shoji are the translucent sliding screens that admit diffused light into interior rooms, and Nishimura's choice to make them the explicit subject signals a [shin-hanga](/glossary/shin-hanga) interest in architectural detail and ambient light rather than human figures. The shin-hanga movement, within which Nishimura worked, was a twentieth-century revival of the collaborative production process of [ukiyo-e](/glossary/ukiyo-e), with designer, carver, printer, and publisher working together to produce editioned woodblock prints. By focusing on Katsura's shoji, the print places itself within an interwar and postwar discourse, advanced by figures such as Bruno Taut, that elevated the villa as a symbol of restrained Japanese aesthetics. The Art Institute's holding sustains the work within an institutional record of mid-twentieth-century Japanese woodblock print production.