Review: Going to Japan by way of Glen Ellyn in ‘Hokusai & Ukiyo-e: The Floating World'

Chicago Tribune

17-06-2025

For those who can't make it to Japan this summer, there is always Glen Ellyn.
'Hokusai & Ukiyo-e: The Floating World,' a multimedia extravaganza inspired by the art of 18th- and 19th-century Japan, is on view through September at the Cleve Carney Museum, on the campus of the College of DuPage. At its core are 70 exquisite examples of woodblock prints, painted scrolls and lacquerware from the Edo Period. The museum has also taken over the entirety of the MAC, the arts center that houses it, and filled theaters and ancillary spaces with interactive exhibits including a walk-through set of traditional Japanese row houses, a display of costumes from the Tom Cruise vehicle 'The Last Samurai,' a children's area for folding origami, and a patio newly tricked out with potted red maples, bonsai, and a wee bridge. Visitors can even collect eki stamps in a free passport booklet, just like at Japanese train stations.
I thought this was all a bit much, then I worried I was being a killjoy, then I learned of 'Hokusai: Another Story,' a high-tech immersive spectacle currently on view in Tokyo, which involves 3D texture image processing, a floor-based haptic system, and airflow control technology, whatever any of that means. By contrast, the MAC's outreach feels amiable and old-school.
Ukiyo-e was basically the pop culture of Edo Japan. The era lasted from 1603 to 1868 and was marked by stability, prosperity and isolationism, brought about by the military reign of the Tokugawa Shogunate. The city of Edo, today called Tokyo, became the country's civic and economic center, and with its growth rose the status of merchants and craftspeople. These newly ascendent urban classes could afford to buy art and they did, becoming the primary audience for ukiyo-e, literally 'pictures of the floating world.' Perennially popular subjects included female beauties, theater stars, famous sites and the voyeuristically exciting red-light districts. 'Hokusai & Ukiyo-e: The Floating World' samples them all.
Ukiyo-e artists might paint unique portraits of famous courtesans or charming everyday tableaux on silk, to be mounted on scrolls for richer clients, and there are plenty of such stunners on display. Don't miss Utagawa Toyoshige's elegant young woman swatting at flies or Miyagawa Choshun's behind-the-scenes look at a kabuki theater. The latter, like the other elaborate handscrolls on display, warrants microscopic examination, so engrossing are the endless tiny details. My favorite section, hidden to the right — handscrolls can only be viewed one section at a time — illustrates a breastfeeding woman in the audience.
But the truly defining medium of ukiyo-e was the woodblock print. This was the art form of the middle class. At the MAC, a small demonstration area explains the collaborative nature of the technique, which arrived from China in the late 1600s: an artist lays down the preparatory design, an engraver transfers it to a slab of cherrywood, a printer does the inking and paper pressing, a publisher oversees and distributes the result. As many as hundreds of copies of an image could be generated.
The most famous woodblock artist, indeed one of the most famous artists of all time, period, is Katsushika Hokusai. The creator of the iconic print known as 'The Great Wave,' he was born in 1760 and over the course of his 88 years produced over 30,000 paintings, sketches, prints and book illustrations. An unusual monochromatic blue version of the wave is on view, as are a handful of other splendid vistas he composed. His biography, detailed at length, includes some zingers. He used over 30 pseudonyms throughout his life and hated cleaning so much he'd simply move to a new home studio when the current one became intolerable. Hokusai was even a forerunner of the contemporary genre of performance painting: at a festival in 1804, he used a broom to render a 600-foot-long portrait of a Buddhist monk. A later event involved a live chicken and red paint.
Hokusai is considered by many to be an early predecessor of manga, the wildly popular graphic novels of Japan, for his 'Hokusai Manga,' a collection of sketches first published in 1814. It's still in print today. Cue the most inspired of the MAC's offshoots: a showcase on the history of manga and anime, from Hokusai through 'Demon Slayer,' staged like a walk-in black-and-white comic book. Exhibition designer Vanessa Thanh Vu runs 2d, a similarly decorated eatery in Lakeview, serving mochi donuts and Taiwanese-style fried chicken sandwiches.
For all that, 'Hokusai & Ukiyo-e: The Floating World' is hardly limited to Hokusai. There are over a dozen artists represented, including the estimable Utagawa Hiroshige. A half-dozen images from his 'One Hundred Famous Views of Edo' reveal a wild sense of color, radical ideas about framing, and a daring ability to combine Japanese and European perspectives. His many series dedicated to meisho, or famous places, partook in a domestic travel boom and helped shape a cohesive idea of Japan as a unified country.
Not all ukiyo-e would have been so acceptable to the government. Political critique was generally censored, and at one point depictions of the theater world were even banned. Artists got around these limitations creatively, even hilariously, as in Utagawa Kuniyoshi's character portraits, with their faces composed of tiny naked figures, interwoven. It didn't always work, though: Kitagawa Utamaro, among others, was arrested for depicting the decadent lifestyle of a long-dead military ruler.
Those images are not on view here, only his elegant tripartite scene of women in the latest fashions, practicing the four arts of stringed instruments, strategy games, calligraphy, and painting. Nearby are cases displaying elaborately crafted versions of related objects, including an exquisitely refined writing box with pens, a gilded deck of poetry playing cards, and a type of three-stringed lute called a shamisen.
The man who collected all of these artworks was Edoardo Chiossone. An Italian engraver born in 1833, he moved to Tokyo in 1875 at the behest of the new Japanese government to help modernize their banknotes. He spent the rest of his life there, working for the Printing Bureau of the Ministry of Finance, being granted the extraordinary honor of producing an official portrait of the Emperor, and amassing a collection of some 15,000 art and artifacts that was bequeathed, upon his death, to the Academy of Arts of Genoa, his alma matter. And here it is today, in Glen Ellyn.