The College Women's Association of Japan Twelfth Annual Exhibition

The College Women's Association of Japan Twelfth Annual Exhibition by Yoshitoshi Mori is a print produced in connection with the long-running fundraising exhibitions organized by the College Women's Association of Japan (CWAJ), an organization founded in 1949 by American and Japanese alumnae of women's colleges to support scholarships and cross-cultural exchange. From early in its history the CWAJ Annual Print Show became one of the most important showcases for modern Japanese printmaking, and many sosaku-hanga (creative print) artists, including Mori, contributed prints both as exhibitors and as designers of association ephemera. Mori (1898-1992) was a natural choice for such a project, given his stature as one of the foremost makers of kappazuri stencil prints within the postwar Japanese print world. His kappazuri technique, learned through his apprenticeship to mingei folk-art leader Serizawa Keisuke, uses hand-cut paper stencils and rice-paste resist on washi to lay down the bold black silhouettes and saturated color fields that define his sheets. By bringing the same graphic vocabulary he applied to kabuki actors, samurai legends, and folk deities to an exhibition print, Mori reaffirmed that sosaku-hanga belonged not only to museum collections but also to the civic life of postwar Japan. The image carries the date of the twelfth annual exhibition and acts simultaneously as an artwork and a piece of cultural record. This impression is held in the British Museum and documented through ukiyo-e.org.