Adoration of the Magi

A Christian subject treated through the lens of nanban imagery — the Three Magi presenting gifts to the infant Christ, an episode that came to Japan via Jesuit missionaries in the sixteenth century before being suppressed. Kawakami's handling reduces the scene to flat color planes with bold outlines, drawing on the visual vocabulary of early nanban byobu screens rather than European devotional painting. The figures wear elaborate robes and hats marking them as foreigners; the composition arranges them in a frieze-like procession rather than the depth-modeled tableau of Western tradition. As a sosaku-hanga artist who carved and printed his own blocks, Kawakami pursued the deliberate naivety of folk woodblock and signboard art rather than the technical refinement of nishiki-e. His Christian and nanban subjects formed a substantial body of work made between the 1920s and 1960s, treating these motifs as exotica that arrived during the brief window of Iberian contact rather than as devotional iconography.