Warship

Kawakami's Warship belongs to the strand of his work that mines the visual language of Bakumatsu-era ship prints and the kurofune (black ship) imagery that flooded Japanese print culture after Perry's 1853 arrival. Rather than the documentary detail of nineteenth-century Yokohama-e, the print compresses hull, rigging, and gunports into a flat silhouette assembled from a small number of color blocks. The masts and stays form a graphic grid against the field of the picture, and the carving betrays the deliberate roughness Kawakami cultivated as part of his folk-art idiom. Self-printed on washi, the impression carries the slight surface variation that hand-printing with a baren produces. Western ships were a continuous subject for Kawakami, who saw them as the historical hinge of the cultural mixing he made his career documenting—Portuguese carracks, Dutch flutes, and the steam-powered vessels of the late Edo period all enter his work as variations on a single theme of arrival from outside.