JASA: 4/5/17 Henry Smith Lecture 

WEDNESDAY, APRIL 5, 2017, 6:00PM 

LECTURE: Re-Creating Ukiyo-e: The Art and Craft of Tachihara Inuki by Professor Henry D. Smith II, Professor Emeritus, Dept. of East Asian Languages & Cultures, Columbia University

Marymount School
1026 Fifth Avenue, between 83rd and 84th Streets
New York, NY 

Tachihara Inuki (1951-2015) occupies a unique place in the history of the Japanese ukiyo-e print as an artist-craftsman who single-handedly assumed all the tasks traditionally distributed among the members of the "ukiyo-e quartet": publisher, designer, woodblock carver and printer. Giving up a brief career as a jazz musician at the age of twenty-five, he set out to master entirely on his own the skills needed to make prints, using as faithfully as possible the tools and materials of nineteenth-century artisans. Over a period of fourteen years from 1978, he produced 60-odd ukiyo-e "recreations" (saigen), striving to produce prints that would have the same visual and tactile impact that they would have had when freshly printed in Edo. From 1992, he turned away from ukiyo-e recreations to his own original sôsaku prints, using the same techniques. This work was diverse, including book illustrations, portraits of contemporary kabuki actors, and most memorably, a group of portraits of what he imagined three of the great ukiyo-e masters to have looked like. Tachihara died in the summer of 2015 shortly before a retrospective exhibition of his work opened at the Hagi Uragami Museum in Yamaguchi Prefecture, for which a handsome catalogue was prepared. 

Reservations are required.

If you would like to attend please register by clicking the Register Now button below,  then click the register now button and fill out the registration form.

Please contact Christy Laidlaw, membership coordinator, via email: japaneseartsoc@yahoo.com or phone: 917-658-3955 with any questions.