Ukiyo-e

Ukiyo-e is a woodblock print art that flourished in Japan's Edo period and was produced by artisan painters. Its main subjects include courtesans and beauties, kabuki actors, erotic prints, folk landscapes, and flowers, birds, insects, and fish—the social customs of the time. It presents the lives and popular fashions of all classes and is therefore called "an encyclopedia of Japanese folk customs." This book is the representative work of Pan Li's years of research on Japanese art. Since its first edition in 2007 it has earned steady praise by word of mouth, and in 2020 Purui Culture released a fully revised edition (often called the "Youth Edition"). The book begins with the thread of Japanese art over more than a century, first tracing the origins of ukiyo-e in Japanese painting traditions, and then entering the social scene of the Edo period: the rise of urban publishing, the downtown culture represented by the Yoshiwara pleasure quarters, and Hishikawa Moronobu's creation of the ukiyo-e form. It then divides the subject matter into major sections—bijinga (beauty prints), shunga (erotic prints), kabuki prints, and landscape and flower-and-bird prints—and traces the lineages of seven major schools, including the Torii and Utagawa schools. It recounts the lives and artistic achievements of thirty-one artists, including Suzuki Harunobu, Torii Kiyonaga, Kitagawa Utamaro, Toshusai Sharaku, Utagawa Kuniyoshi, Katsushika Hokusai, and Utagawa Hiroshige, and analyzes the style of more than two hundred classic works, including Series on Love in Poetry, Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji, and One Hundred Famous Views of Edo. The second half of the book looks beyond the Sea of Japan: the influence of Ming-Qing and Western art on Japan, the imported nature of uki-e (perspective prints), and how ukiyo-e, after reaching Europe and America in the late nineteenth century, sparked the Japonisme craze and participated in the revolution in color and composition of Impressionism. The final chapter discusses the cultural connotations and stylistic features of ukiyo-e and its modern implications, while the appendices examine technical details such as pigments, paper, carving blocks, and printing, bringing the works back to a tangible material level. This revised edition adds new research findings, supplements several classic works and interpretations, and upgrades the design and binding.