Li Bai (Japanese: Ri Haku), from the series "A True Mirror of Japanese and Chinese Poems (Shiika shashin kyo)"

Li Bai, from the series A True Mirror of Japanese and Chinese Poems (Shiika shashin kyo), is one of Katsushika Hokusai's most ambitious narrative landscapes, designed in the late 1820s in the large nagaban format that the series favored. The print illustrates the Tang dynasty poet Li Bai (read in Japanese as Ri Haku) gazing in awe at the Lushan waterfall, a scene celebrated in his most famous verses. Hokusai shows the poet as a small figure at the base of the composition, attended by two boys, while a vast cataract pours down a ravine of sheer cliffs above him. The waterfall is rendered in pale lines of falling water against deep Prussian blue rocks, with mist softening the upper distance and pine trees clinging to the precipice. Although the subject is Chinese, the print belongs squarely to the world of Edo ukiyo-e: it was carved and printed in Edo, sold to a sophisticated urban audience steeped in Sinophile literary taste, and uses the same chuban-derived landscape vocabulary Hokusai had refined in his Mount Fuji and waterfall series. The impression in the Art Institute of Chicago shows the rich graduated printing that makes the Shiika shashin kyo set so prized. As an ukiyo-e print, Li Bai exemplifies Hokusai's interest in fusing classical East Asian poetry with the spectacular landscape designs of his late career, and it remains a touchstone for understanding how he reimagined Chinese subjects within Japanese woodblock practice.