Iki Island

Iki Island by Utagawa Hiroshige is a landscape print of the small island of Iki, between Kyushu and Tsushima in the Genkai Sea. Iki, historically important as a way-station between Japan and the Asian mainland, sat well outside the ordinary travel range of Edo audiences, and Hiroshige's image therefore performs the work of imagined geography that so many of his prints carried out: bringing distant Japanese provinces into the visual repertoire of Edo households. The composition typically uses a low horizon, a high band of sky, and a series of receding headlands to suggest the island's situation in open water; small boats and shoreline buildings give the scene local character. As Edo ukiyo-e, the design relies on Hiroshige's familiar atmospheric handling -- gradated blues across water and sky, careful registration of color blocks, and economy of line in the foreground vegetation. The print fits within his broader interest in the famous places of the Japanese provinces, projects that paralleled and extended his more celebrated Edo and Tokaido work. The Audrey and Harry Hahn Gift impression at the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria, indexed on ukiyo-e.org, ensures that this less-familiar corner of Hiroshige's geographic imagination remains visible, and contributes another data point to the picture of the artist as a true national chronicler in the landscape print medium.