Creating surimono for the New Year

Creating Surimono for the New Year is a Katsushika Hokusai ukiyo-e print from around 1825, held in the Art Institute of Chicago. Surimono were privately commissioned woodblock prints exchanged at the New Year by poetry circles, courtiers, and cultivated patrons; they often featured seasonal subjects, classical references, and verses paired with elaborately printed imagery. This design takes the production of surimono itself as its subject, showing figures absorbed in the work of designing, brushing, or arranging materials for the year's exchange. The scene captures the social and creative rituals around the New Year holiday, when Edo's poetry clubs gathered to share verses, commission prints, and present sheets as gifts. Hokusai, deeply embedded in surimono culture, designed thousands of such prints over his career, and this work doubles as both image and self-reflexive meditation on the genre. The composition combines domestic interior details, brushes, paper, lacquered boxes, with the small ritual objects of New Year's celebration. As an Edo ukiyo-e print, the work exemplifies how Katsushika Hokusai used the surimono format to elevate everyday creative labor into a refined cultural event, while its technical execution showcases the metallic pigments, embossing, and precise color registration available to privately funded editions. The Art Institute of Chicago preserves this ukiyo-e print as a record of Hokusai's intimate engagement with the surimono world.