Dancing at the New Carlton Hotel, Shanghai

This 1924 print, held in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (and also represented in the Art Institute of Chicago), is one of Yamamura Kōka's most culturally remarkable single sheets, a depiction of a cosmopolitan ballroom evening at the New Carlton Hotel in Shanghai. By 1924 Shanghai had become the most concentrated cosmopolitan modern city in East Asia, with its International Settlement and French Concession giving it a hybrid Anglo-French-Chinese-Japanese commercial culture that drew tourists, businessmen, and journalists from across the region. The New Carlton, one of the leading luxury hotels of the city, was a major venue for Western-style dancing, jazz performance, and high-bourgeois leisure; Kōka's print captures the cosmopolitan glamour of the venue in a horizontal composition, with elegantly dressed couples in formal Western evening clothing dancing under a softly modeled lighting that gives the entire image the atmosphere of a modern cinematographic frame. The work is one of the earliest Japanese woodblock prints to address the modernist subject of the cosmopolitan urban leisure economy of the treaty-port city, and it shows Kōka's full command of the [shin-hanga](/glossary/shin-hanga) workshop's color and modeling resources turned to a subject completely outside the traditional kabuki and [bijin-ga](/glossary/bijin-ga) repertoire. The MFA Boston impression is a strong example of one of the artist's most-historically resonant prints, and contributes importantly to the museum's outstanding collection of early-twentieth-century Japanese cosmopolitan modernism.