Manchuria (Manshu)
Manshu
About This Series
Manshu, here translated Manchuria, is a small print suite in which Azechi Umetaro (1902-1999) treated the landscape and people of the former Japanese-administered northeast Chinese territory that he encountered as a young man in connection with the postal and topographical work of his prewar career. Azechi, the largely self-taught sosaku-hanga artist who would become best known after the war for his mountain prints, took up woodblock around 1930 under the encouragement of Hiratsuka Un'ichi and Onchi Koshiro after his move to Tokyo for postal-service employment, and the Manshu sheets belong to the early phase of his print practice in which he applied his developing graphic vocabulary to figural and topographical subjects drawn from his own travel. The series participates in the broader Japanese pictorial engagement with continental Asia of the late 1930s and early 1940s, but in a register conspicuously distinct from the official imagery of the Manchukuo period, treating Mongol horsemen, herding people, and steppe landscape as folk subjects rather than as imperial allegory and bringing to them the flattened, broadly massed manner that he would later apply to Japanese alpinists and Tohoku villagers. As a sosaku-hanga artist Azechi self-carved and self-printed the sheets in small editions, the wood-grain and the slight irregularity of hand-rubbed baren patterns visible across the broad color areas as evidence of the artist's direct touch. The Manshu series is documented in Tatsuro Azechi's catalogue of his father's prints and in the Azechi holdings of the Ehime Prefectural Museum of Art near the artist's birthplace as well as in the prewar Japanese print collections of the Museum of Modern Art New York and the Honolulu Museum of Art.
Prints in This Series (3)
Frequently Asked Questions
Manshu, here translated Manchuria, is a small print suite in which Azechi Umetaro (1902-1999) treated the landscape and people of the former Japanese-administered northeast Chinese territory that he encountered as a young man in connection with the postal and topographical work of his prewar career. Azechi, the largely self-taught sosaku-hanga artist who would become best known after the war for his mountain prints, took up woodblock around 1930 under the encouragement of Hiratsuka Un'ichi and Onchi Koshiro after his move to Tokyo for postal-service employment, and the Manshu sheets belong to the early phase of his print practice in which he applied his developing graphic vocabulary to figural and topographical subjects drawn from his own travel. The series participates in the broader Japanese pictorial engagement with continental Asia of the late 1930s and early 1940s, but in a register conspicuously distinct from the official imagery of the Manchukuo period, treating Mongol horsemen, herding people, and steppe landscape as folk subjects rather than as imperial allegory and bringing to them the flattened, broadly massed manner that he would later apply to Japanese alpinists and Tohoku villagers. As a sosaku-hanga artist Azechi self-carved and self-printed the sheets in small editions, the wood-grain and the slight irregularity of hand-rubbed baren patterns visible across the broad color areas as evidence of the artist's direct touch. The Manshu series is documented in Tatsuro Azechi's catalogue of his father's prints and in the Azechi holdings of the Ehime Prefectural Museum of Art near the artist's birthplace as well as in the prewar Japanese print collections of the Museum of Modern Art New York and the Honolulu Museum of Art.
The Manchuria (Manshu) series contains 3 prints, created by Umetaro Azechi.
The Manchuria (Manshu) series was created by Umetaro Azechi (畦地梅太郎).
We currently have 3 of 3 known prints from the Manchuria (Manshu) series indexed in our collection. Browse them all on this page.
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