Recollections of Tokyo
About This Series
Tokyo kaiko zue, here rendered Recollections of Tokyo, is the collaborative wartime print album organized by Onchi Koshiro and the Ichimoku-kai print society in which a group of sosaku-hanga artists revisited the topography of the imperial capital in a sequence of single-sheet compositions, each contributor producing one or more views of remembered Tokyo neighborhoods, monuments, and street scenes. Yamaguchi Gen (1903-1976) participated in the project alongside Onchi, Hiratsuka Un'ichi, Sekino Junichiro, Maekawa Senpan, Kawakami Sumio, Azechi Umetaro, and other Ichimoku-kai colleagues, contributing one or more sheets in his developing sosaku-hanga manner. Yamaguchi, an Onchi student who had taken up woodblock in the 1920s and would by the postwar decades emerge as one of the principal abstract sosaku-hanga artists, brought to the Tokyo kaiko zue the modernist concern for flattened plane and rhythmic surface organization that distinguished his teacher's mature work. The recollective title of the project acknowledges the urban transformation that had overtaken Tokyo since the 1923 earthquake and that would soon culminate in the wartime destruction of much of the city's fabric, and Yamaguchi's sheets are best read alongside his colleagues' as a collective sosaku-hanga response to the disappearance of remembered urban places. Each contribution is self-carved and self-printed in the artisanal manner that distinguished the Ichimoku-kai project from the carver-printer collaborations of shin-hanga, and the album was issued in a small numbered edition for subscribers. After the war Yamaguchi would emerge as a leading figure of the abstract sosaku-hanga that consolidated around Onchi and the postwar Tokyo Biennale, his work entering the Museum of Modern Art New York, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Honolulu Museum of Art in the wake of Oliver Statler's 1956 book Modern Japanese Prints, and impressions of his Tokyo kaiko zue contributions are preserved alongside the album's other sheets in these and other principal collections of twentieth-century Japanese print.
Frequently Asked Questions
Tokyo kaiko zue, here rendered Recollections of Tokyo, is the collaborative wartime print album organized by Onchi Koshiro and the Ichimoku-kai print society in which a group of sosaku-hanga artists revisited the topography of the imperial capital in a sequence of single-sheet compositions, each contributor producing one or more views of remembered Tokyo neighborhoods, monuments, and street scenes. Yamaguchi Gen (1903-1976) participated in the project alongside Onchi, Hiratsuka Un'ichi, Sekino Junichiro, Maekawa Senpan, Kawakami Sumio, Azechi Umetaro, and other Ichimoku-kai colleagues, contributing one or more sheets in his developing sosaku-hanga manner. Yamaguchi, an Onchi student who had taken up woodblock in the 1920s and would by the postwar decades emerge as one of the principal abstract sosaku-hanga artists, brought to the Tokyo kaiko zue the modernist concern for flattened plane and rhythmic surface organization that distinguished his teacher's mature work. The recollective title of the project acknowledges the urban transformation that had overtaken Tokyo since the 1923 earthquake and that would soon culminate in the wartime destruction of much of the city's fabric, and Yamaguchi's sheets are best read alongside his colleagues' as a collective sosaku-hanga response to the disappearance of remembered urban places. Each contribution is self-carved and self-printed in the artisanal manner that distinguished the Ichimoku-kai project from the carver-printer collaborations of shin-hanga, and the album was issued in a small numbered edition for subscribers. After the war Yamaguchi would emerge as a leading figure of the abstract sosaku-hanga that consolidated around Onchi and the postwar Tokyo Biennale, his work entering the Museum of Modern Art New York, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Honolulu Museum of Art in the wake of Oliver Statler's 1956 book Modern Japanese Prints, and impressions of his Tokyo kaiko zue contributions are preserved alongside the album's other sheets in these and other principal collections of twentieth-century Japanese print.
The Recollections of Tokyo series contains 2 prints, created by Gen Yamaguchi.
The Recollections of Tokyo series was created by Gen Yamaguchi (山口源).
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