Ueno Toshogu

Ueno Toshogu depicts the seventeenth-century shrine within Tokyo's Ueno Park dedicated to Tokugawa Ieyasu, distinguished by its lavish gold leaf ornamentation, elaborately carved kara-mon gate, and the avenue of stone and bronze lanterns donated by feudal lords. Morimura's treatment of this dense site likely focuses on a single architectural element — the karahafu gable, a section of the gilt facade, or a row of stone toro — rather than the full structure, in keeping with his preference for selective, frame-filling compositions. The shrine's chromatic richness gives Morimura license to deploy stronger reds, blacks, and metallic ochres than usual, often layered with [bokashi](/glossary/bokashi) to suggest the deep recessed shadows of carved bracketing. As a Tokyo-born artist, Morimura returns repeatedly to landmarks of his native city, and Ueno Toshogu joins his renderings of Sensoji, Yushima, and other capital shrines as part of an extended urban-architectural sequence. The print situates his practice within the [meisho-e](/glossary/meisho-e) tradition while modernizing it through abstracted geometry and a contemporary [sosaku-hanga](/glossary/sosaku-hanga) sensibility.