Susaki, from a series of New Uki-e

Susaki, from a series of New Uki-e is a woodblock print by Takahashi Shotei, the Tokyo-born landscape designer better known under his art name Hiroaki, whose vast output for the publisher Watanabe Shozaburo helped establish the [chuban](/glossary/chuban) landscape as a workhorse format within the [shin-hanga](/glossary/shin-hanga) revival. The composition revisits the Edo motif of Susaki, the low-lying spit at the mouth of the Sumida River where the Benten shrine commanded an open prospect of Edo Bay. The 'uki-e' label refers to the older convention of dramatic single-point perspective, and Shotei plays with that lineage by setting receding shorelines and water lanes against a high horizon, encouraging the eye to glide outward from a foreground bank toward distant sail-dots. The print is preserved in the collection of the Chazen Museum of Art at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, and the impression there shows the soft graduated [bokashi](/glossary/bokashi) skies for which Watanabe's workshop became famous, achieved by wiping pigment across the printing block with damp cloths before each pull. Although Shotei was an exceptionally prolific shin-hanga designer, his reputation was nearly erased by the 1923 Great Kanto earthquake, which destroyed most of his original blocks and finished impressions in Watanabe's stockroom. As a result, surviving early-period sheets like this Susaki view carry an outsized importance for tracking the development of the artist's voice and the wider revival's affection for waterside Tokyo subjects. The print also illustrates how Shotei mediated between Edo precedent and the modern collector market that Watanabe Shozaburo cultivated abroad, retaining classical place-names and pictorial cues while compressing the design into the intimate chuban landscape sheet his foreign clients preferred. As such it is a useful entry point into the artist's body of work and into the publisher's broader project of repackaging Japanese scenery for early twentieth-century audiences.