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 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 tradition while modernizing it through abstracted geometry and a contemporary sosaku-hanga sensibility.