Welcome to One Fine Show, where Observer highlights a recently opened exhibition at a museum not in New York City, a place we know and love that already receives plenty of attention.
Prints are having a market moment, especially with young people. Last summer, the Art Newspaper reported that “Gen Z (at present capped at 27 years old) spent more on prints than any other age range last year” and that when it comes to the next generation of collectors, 75 percent are looking for prints. Perhaps these people are drawn to the rough, punky aesthetics these works tend to have—a zig to the zag of the Millennial fondness for bubbly letters and the color pink—and the creative possibilities afforded by its experimentation. Or maybe this is all they can afford.
Regardless, recent institutional shows have proven that this is no second-rate medium. The latest among them is “The Print Generation” at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Asian Art. This exhibition focuses on the generation of Japanese printmakers in the early decades of the 20th Century who reinvented the medium by undertaking all aspects of its creation that might otherwise be divided among other artisans. This sōsaku hanga (creative print) movement saw the creators designing, and printing the works themselves, coalescing around the “First Thursday Society,” organized by Onchi Kōshirō (1891-1955), whose members met monthly from 1939 until Onchi’s death.
Printmaking has been a popular medium in Japan since the Edo period, but the seventy-six works featured in “The Print Generation” showcase how the new methodology of sōsaku hanga yielded works unlike any that had been seen before, thanks no doubt to what press materials refer to as the “imperialist expansion, wartime scarcity, and foreign occupation” that Japan experienced during their creation.
A prime example of the innovation on display would be Shinagawa Takumi’s Kabuki Actor (1953), which breaks up the melodramatic face of its subject with rigorous graphic design elements alongside organic-feeling waves that swell in the background. A nation broken by forces natural and unnatural could hardly ask for a better icon. As experimental as that work is, it does still read as a print. Sekino Jun’ichirō’s Shells (1953), meanwhile, feels akin to a video game company trying to show off what is possible with the latest advancements in technology. It doesn’t even look two-dimensional; you can almost smell the mackerel.
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These works emerged from changing times but are about them, too. Night of Ginza from Recollections of Tokyo (1946) by Kawakami Sumio shows an urbane crowd in Western outfits amid pink buildings representative of a world going topsy-turvy. Japan’s modernization happened gradually and then suddenly, as chronicled by the American author James A. Michener, who served in the Pacific during World War II. Alongside his novels, Michener wrote the text for two books of Japanese prints, which are present in this show alongside a woodblock portrait of the writer by Hiratsuka Un’ichi from 1957. In it, Michener sits, hands clasped amid older prints of geisha and samurai. We are asked to consider his gaze and whether his perspective might deepen the tradition that surrounds him.
“The Print Generation” is on view at the National Museum of Asian Art through April 27.
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