Cicada

Cicada (Semi) is a color woodblock print after Kikuchi Hōbun's original drawing, published in the Shima Art Co. kachō-e edition. The cicada is one of the canonical insect subjects of the East Asian kachō-e tradition: rendered most often resting on the bark of a tree or in the act of singing in the late-summer heat, it carries strong associations of the impermanence of life (the insect's brief summer existence), the cycle of the seasons, and the immediate auditory experience of late summer in the Japanese landscape. Hōbun's handling deploys the close drawing of the insect's body — the translucent wings, the segmented thorax, the small head turned in profile — that the Maruyama-Shijō tradition had developed for insect subjects in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, combined with the restrained background and quiet color that distinguished his mature kachō-e production. The print belongs to the small-format insect and bird subjects that the Osaka publisher Shima Art Co. issued from the late Meiji period through the inter-war decades for the international decorative-print market.