Tea House with Morning Glory

Tea House with Morning Glory pairs two recurring motifs in Morimura's repertoire: a modest sukiya-style structure rendered in crisp geometric planes, and the asagao vine whose trumpet-shaped blooms have signified summer mornings in Japanese visual culture since the Edo period. Compositions of this kind typically isolate a corner of the tea house — a latticed shoji panel, a tiled eave, a stepping stone — and let the climbing morning glory animate the frame with curving vines and saturated indigo or murasaki blossoms. Morimura carves vegetal forms with rhythmic, near-decorative repetition, contrasting them against the architectural rectilinearity behind. The print would have been pulled from numerous blocks on kozo-fiber washi, with bokashi reserved for the quiet wall surfaces that anchor the brighter floral notes. The subject connects Morimura's work to the broader kacho-e tradition while remaining firmly within his own architectural-landscape idiom. Morning glories also carry chanoyu associations — Sen no Rikyu famously cut his entire garden's blossoms but one — lending the image a quiet cultural resonance beyond pure description.