Jiang Shi (Kyo Shi), from the series "Twenty-four Paragons of Filial Piety in China (Morokoshi nijushiko)"

Jiang Shi (Kyo Shi), from Utagawa Kuniyoshi's 1843 series Twenty-four Paragons of Filial Piety in China (Morokoshi nijushiko), depicts one of the celebrated Confucian exemplars of filial piety. The traditional story of Jiang Shi recounts how he and his wife served their elderly mother with such devotion that the gods rewarded them: a freshwater spring whose taste matched her favorite river water sprang up beside their home, and two carp leapt from it daily to provide the fish she enjoyed. The miraculous spring became the standard pictorial sign for Jiang Shi in East Asian art, and Kuniyoshi's nishiki-e composition follows this iconography. Although Kuniyoshi is best known for warrior prints, his engagement with Chinese moral and legendary subjects was extensive, reflecting the strong currents of Confucian learning and Sinophilic interest that ran through late Edo culture. The Morokoshi nijushiko series gives Edo viewers a complete cycle of the Twenty-four Paragons, the most widely circulated Chinese moral compendium in Tokugawa Japan, translated into the visual language of Edo ukiyo-e. The series appeared in 1843, late in the Tenpo era, and demonstrates Kuniyoshi's command of color woodblock printing in service of didactic subject matter. The composition's attention to robe pattern, gesture, and miraculous landscape detail invites the viewer to recognize the legendary identifiers of Jiang Shi's piety. This impression is preserved in the collection of the Art Institute of Chicago.