Yang Xiang (Yo Kyo), from the series "Twenty-four Paragons of Filial Piety in China (Morokoshi nijushiko)"

Yang Xiang (Yo Kyo), from Utagawa Kuniyoshi's 1843 series Twenty-four Paragons of Filial Piety in China (Morokoshi nijushiko), illustrates one of the most dramatic episodes in the traditional Chinese compendium of filial exemplars. The story of Yang Xiang recounts how, as a fourteen-year-old boy walking with her father, she encountered a tiger that attacked them; rather than flee, Yang Xiang threw herself onto the tiger and fought it off, saving her father's life. Although a relatively unusual female warrior story within the cycle, Yang Xiang's act of physical bravery in defense of a parent fit the Confucian framework of filial devotion that the Twenty-four Paragons celebrates. Kuniyoshi, the great Edo master of warrior prints (musha-e), is unusually well suited to a paragons-of-filial-piety subject that calls for combat imagery. His figure work brings the tiger and the young heroine into dynamic engagement, demonstrating the same energetic line that animates his most famous musha-e. As Edo ukiyo-e of the late Tenpo era, the print uses nishiki-e color woodblock techniques to render the tiger's striped coat, Yang Xiang's robes, and the rocky setting in a unified composition. The series translates Chinese Confucian moral teaching into the popular visual language of mid-nineteenth-century Japanese print culture. This impression is preserved in the collection of the Art Institute of Chicago.