Journey to the Homeland (Sokoku e no tabi)
Sokoku e no tabi
About This Series
Journey to the Homeland (Sokoku e no tabi) is the major postwar landscape cycle of Kitaoka Fumio, a body of woodblock prints through which the sosaku-hanga artist addressed Japanese sites across the decades after his return to Japan from his postwar period of detention and repatriation in northeastern China. Kitaoka Fumio, born in 1918 in Tokyo and trained in oil painting and printmaking at the Tokyo Fine Arts School before the wartime mobilization, was conscripted into the Japanese army and stationed in Manchuria during the closing years of the Pacific War, and his subsequent detention by the Soviet and Chinese forces and eventual repatriation to Japan in the late 1940s supplied the autobiographical premise that the Journey to the Homeland title encoded. The cycle, developed across the 1950s, 1960s, and subsequent decades, treats Japanese landscape, rural villages, and traditional architectural and seasonal subjects through the artist-cut, artist-printed sosaku-hanga method that Kitaoka had absorbed through his association with the postwar Japanese Print Association (Nihon Hanga Kyokai) and through his study under the foundational sosaku-hanga artist Hiratsuka Unichi. The sosaku-hanga production method, in which the artist personally cut his own blocks and supervised or executed his own printing in opposition to the collaborative division of labor of the inherited ukiyo-e and contemporary shin-hanga workshops, gave Kitaoka's prints an authorial directness in which the cutting marks of the gouge and the exposed grain of the wood block supplied part of the expressive vocabulary, and the Journey to the Homeland cycle accordingly carries the material trace of its production as part of its meaning. Within Kitaoka's career the Sokoku e no tabi cycle stands as one of the principal projects of his postwar output, alongside his foreign travel series, his nudes and figural work, and his various other strands of landscape and place portrait, and the cycle's autobiographical premise positions it as one of the most personal of his sustained projects. Modern scholarship treats Kitaoka as a representative figure of the postwar sosaku-hanga generation, working in the tradition that Onchi Koshiro, Hiratsuka Unichi, and Maekawa Senpan had established and that Saito Kiyoshi had carried into international recognition through the 1951 Sao Paulo Biennale, and the Journey to the Homeland cycle stands as one of his principal contributions to the postwar Japanese landscape tradition. Representative impressions are held by major Western collections of twentieth-century Japanese print, including the Art Institute of Chicago, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, and the Honolulu Museum of Art.
Prints in This Series (1)
Frequently Asked Questions
Journey to the Homeland (Sokoku e no tabi) is the major postwar landscape cycle of Kitaoka Fumio, a body of woodblock prints through which the sosaku-hanga artist addressed Japanese sites across the decades after his return to Japan from his postwar period of detention and repatriation in northeastern China. Kitaoka Fumio, born in 1918 in Tokyo and trained in oil painting and printmaking at the Tokyo Fine Arts School before the wartime mobilization, was conscripted into the Japanese army and stationed in Manchuria during the closing years of the Pacific War, and his subsequent detention by the Soviet and Chinese forces and eventual repatriation to Japan in the late 1940s supplied the autobiographical premise that the Journey to the Homeland title encoded. The cycle, developed across the 1950s, 1960s, and subsequent decades, treats Japanese landscape, rural villages, and traditional architectural and seasonal subjects through the artist-cut, artist-printed sosaku-hanga method that Kitaoka had absorbed through his association with the postwar Japanese Print Association (Nihon Hanga Kyokai) and through his study under the foundational sosaku-hanga artist Hiratsuka Unichi. The sosaku-hanga production method, in which the artist personally cut his own blocks and supervised or executed his own printing in opposition to the collaborative division of labor of the inherited ukiyo-e and contemporary shin-hanga workshops, gave Kitaoka's prints an authorial directness in which the cutting marks of the gouge and the exposed grain of the wood block supplied part of the expressive vocabulary, and the Journey to the Homeland cycle accordingly carries the material trace of its production as part of its meaning. Within Kitaoka's career the Sokoku e no tabi cycle stands as one of the principal projects of his postwar output, alongside his foreign travel series, his nudes and figural work, and his various other strands of landscape and place portrait, and the cycle's autobiographical premise positions it as one of the most personal of his sustained projects. Modern scholarship treats Kitaoka as a representative figure of the postwar sosaku-hanga generation, working in the tradition that Onchi Koshiro, Hiratsuka Unichi, and Maekawa Senpan had established and that Saito Kiyoshi had carried into international recognition through the 1951 Sao Paulo Biennale, and the Journey to the Homeland cycle stands as one of his principal contributions to the postwar Japanese landscape tradition. Representative impressions are held by major Western collections of twentieth-century Japanese print, including the Art Institute of Chicago, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, and the Honolulu Museum of Art.
The Journey to the Homeland (Sokoku e no tabi) series contains 15 prints, created by Fumio Kitaoka.
The Journey to the Homeland (Sokoku e no tabi) series was created by Fumio Kitaoka (北岡文雄).
We currently have 1 of 15 known prints from the Journey to the Homeland (Sokoku e no tabi) series indexed in our collection. Browse them all on this page.
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