Latest news with #Hokusai
7NEWS
3 days ago
- Automotive
- 7NEWS
Best-selling LEGO Japanese framed wall art to build and hang in your home
If long, dark evenings is inspiring you to find a new hobby, why not try a LEGO framed wall art, a fun arts and crafts activity for the whole family. Great for winding down from a long day at the office (or class) the Hokusai, The Great Wave kit has 1,810 LEGO pieces for creating a 3D artwork of the famous painting, and can be hung up on the wall once complete. A fan-favourite for hundreds of shoppers, those who have got their hands on the kit have described it as 'excellent,' and 'looks great on a wall.' Making the ideal gift for a birthday or special occasion, it's perfect for adults (18+) and art lovers, plus there's even a QR code to scan to access a specially curated soundtrack. Now 32 per cent off in a limited-time deal, you can pick up the LEGO Art Hokusai Wall Art for just $115.58 (down from $169.99). Shop more LEGO at Amazon Australia: LEGO Star Wars Venator-Class Republic Attack Cruiser, was $999.99 now $729.24 LEGO Star Wars Jabba's Sail Barge UCS Building Set, was $799.99 now $602.91 LEGO Technic Porsche 911 RSR Sports Car Set, was $299.99 now $222.83
The Mainichi
4 days ago
- General
- The Mainichi
Edging Toward Japan: The Japanese discovery of the colour blue
I seem to recall some years ago reading a short story by Haruki Murakami calling "Losing Blue" ("Ao ga Kieru"). If memory serves, this describes a man waking up one morning to discover, to his sadness, that the colour blue has completely vanished from the world, though nobody else apart from him appears to have noticed. The story seemed to me like quite a clever allegory for so many things that slip away from us in the modern world without anyone apparently realising. However, it's not so much losing the colour blue, but discovering it in the first place that has been on my mind recently. In July last year I was at an exhibition at the auction house Sotheby's in London and got to admire up close some original prints by Hokusai and Hiroshige. We are so used to images of Hokusai's famous depiction of "The Great Wave" or his blue-infused vision of Mount Fuji that we tend to think of the "blueyness" of this art as quintessentially Japanese. Yet a particular set of historical circumstances, and international influences, helped to produce this iconic art. A clampdown by the Japanese government on the depictions of the lusty pleasure quarters so beloved by ukiyo-e artists of the 18th century like Harunobu and Utamaro forced 19th century artists like Hokusai and Hiroshige to devote their attention to landscape portraiture instead. And crucially, they were suddenly given access to a vibrantly new colour pigment, Prussian Blue, produced in the factories of Northern Europe -- a world until then entirely closed to them. The combination of Japanese artists having their eyes turned towards previously ignored subjects and having a newly imported colour in which to paint them helped produce such iconic, visually arresting artworks. But then, the story of Japan's interaction with the colour blue has always been a rather peculiar one. One of the first things any student of elementary Japanese learns is that the word for "blue" in Japanese is "ao," but that this word actually means "blue or green." I must confess that, for long decades, I did not understand this. How could a word mean both blue and green? This seemed to me equivalent to having a word that meant "square or circular" i.e. very confusing about the meaning it is trying to convey. What makes this even more baffling is that the Japanese language also has a perfectly clear and common word for "green" ("midori"). So why on Earth would you not just have a word for "blue" ("ao") without bringing in the possibility that what you are talking about is not blue at all, but green? In terms of everyday usage, "ao" does indeed mean for most of the time "blue," but just when you think you can ignore the confusing "...or green" part of its meaning, it turns out that "green" things, which could be called "midori," are also called "ao." The most common example of this is the green of a traffic light, which is "ao," not "midori." As if all this isn't confusing enough, the expression for "deep green," the type of green you see when walking through summer woods for example, is "ao ao shita midori," which literally means "blue blue green." Why can't Japan keep "blue" and "green" apart? To answer that question, you have to think about the way we conceptualize colour in the world. We tend to think it natural to clearly differentiate the colours in a light spectrum as red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet etc. But there is no particular reason why a specific band of the light spectrum is intrinsically obvious to us a definitive colour. Both wider and narrower bands of colour on the light spectrum might appear to us as recognizable colours depending on our associations with them. Most colours are obvious to us by connection with objects in the real world: blood is red; the sun is yellow. Indeed, many colours in Japanese are denoted by connection to real world objects. Grey is "rat-coloured" (nezumi-iro) or "ash-coloured" (hai-iro), while brown is "tea-coloured" (cha-iro). The problem with blue is that there are not many solid objects in the world that we can actually associate with blue. The two things people immediately think when you mention "blue" are the sky and the sea, but both of these are things you cannot grasp and whose colour are often a will-o-the-wisp of illusion. Pour some of that "blue" sea into a glass and it suddenly turns out to be colourless. The sky meanwhile is just empty air. With no solid object of fixed colour against which to correlate, "blue" has historically had the capacity to range loosely over the colour spectrum. In the case of Japan, "ao" denoted a range of blue and green, and retained that meaning even after the introduction of the word "midori" for green in the Heian Period. Japan is by no means unique in its often confusing approach to the colour "blue." In his book, "The World According to Colour", the art historian James Fox remarks how when European nations came into first contact with many ancient cultures -- from Pacific Islanders to the bushmen of southern Africa -- during the 19th century, they were baffled by the fact that so many of them seemed to have difficulty discerning exactly what "blue" was. Theories even abounded that they might even be colour blind to "blue." It's now more generally accepted that the decisive factor is linguistic and nearly all civilizations define "blue" at a later stage than other colours such as red, white and green. As the Victorian Prime Minister William Gladstone observed, Homer frequently refers to the "wine-dark sea" and yet never once calls either the sea or the sky "blue." Is this because Homer was -- as tradition has it -- blind or is it because there was simply no precise concept of "blue" amongst the Greeks of his time? We live in a world in which we often pessimistically contemplate, like Haruki Murakami's protagonist, how dangerously close we are to losing precious things from the world. But we sometimes forget just how recently even something as blindingly obvious as the colour blue fully entered our field of vision. When you look again at those intensely redolent blues of Hokusai's and Hiroshige's prints -- of Great Waves of Blue surging over you or a Mount Fuji of Blue soaring in your imagination -- you gain some sense of what it must have felt like to have the scales taken from your eyes and a primary colour to be transmitted to your senses in overwhelming Technicolor magnificence for the first time. There is seeing and then there is seeing. And there is always the potential of waking up one morning and perceiving the hues and texture of the world in a thrilling new way. @DamianFlanagan (This is Part 60 of a series) In this column, Damian Flanagan, a researcher in Japanese literature, ponders about Japanese culture as he travels back and forth between Japan and Britain. Profile: Damian Flanagan is an author and critic born in Britain in 1969. He studied in Tokyo and Kyoto between 1989 and 1990 while a student at Cambridge University. He was engaged in research activities at Kobe University from 1993 through 1999. After taking the master's and doctoral courses in Japanese literature, he earned a Ph.D. in 2000. He is now based in both Nishinomiya, Hyogo Prefecture, and Manchester. He is the author of "Natsume Soseki: Superstar of World Literature" (Sekai Bungaku no superstar Natsume Soseki).
Axios
6 days ago
- Entertainment
- Axios
Hokusai's Japan comes to Chicago in new exhibit
Immerse yourself in the rich world of historical Japanese art and culture this summer just an hour's drive from the city. Why it matters: For the first time, the " Hokusai & Ukiyo-e: The Floating World" exhibition is visiting the U.S. At the Cleve Carney Museum of Art in Glen Ellyn, you can see artifacts, paintings and original works by Hokusai as well as handcrafted objects from the Edo period. The vibe: You can also explore an immersive, comic-inspired room by Vanessa and Kevin Vu, owners of Chicago's 2d Restaurant. The space is great for photo-ops and takes you through the evolution of manga-Japanese comics. There are hands-on activities for kids inside the discovery center, and you can step outside to explore the Great Wave Gardens. Context: A record 3.3 million foreigners traveled to Japan in July 2024, according to the Japan National Tourism Organization. Americans made up about 8% of inbound tourists last July. What they're saying:"Japanese Ukiyo-e artists have had a profound influence on global visual culture, and although these works are centuries old, they continue to resonate powerfully with counterpart audiences," curator Justin Witte said in a statement. My thought bubble: This exhibit is a must-see for anyone interested in exploring other cultures or fascinated by Japan's shogun era. You can also try Edo-inspired food and grab some memorabilia at the gift shop. If you go: The exhibit opens Saturday at the Cleve Carney Museum of Art on the College of DuPage campus in Glen Ellyn.
Phone Arena
22-05-2025
- Phone Arena
This brand-new MSI laptop belongs to a museum – and I don't mean that as an insult
There are over 150 computer museums around the world, and here's a laptop that any such museum would be honored to display. However, the laptop I'm talking about is brand-new, so it's not yet time to put it in a of the reasons we go to a (non-computer) museum is because today, nothing in our everyday life quite strikes us like a Caravaggio painting. Tech is useful, practical – indispensable, even – but it's rarely beautiful… and never breathtaking as an art of work from the past might be bridging this gap with its latest, super fancy and limited-edition Prestige 13 AI+ Evo ultrabook, now featuring iconic Japanese artwork. This version is called "Ukiyo-e Edition" and it displays The Great Wave off Kanagawa by 19th-century artist Katsushika Hokusai on its lid. The design is handcrafted through a meticulous five-step process by Japanese artisan company Okadaya, making each unit unique and (sadly) limiting the number of laptops that can be the appearance has changed, the internal hardware remains the same as last year's model – and that's perfect with me. Clearly, this machine is all about looks, not incorporating 2025 cutting-edge hardware. Image by MSI The laptop runs on an Intel Core Ultra 9 288V processor with a mix of performance and efficiency cores, reaching speeds up to 5.1GHz. It also features Intel's Arc 140V integrated graphics (iGPU), which is capable of handling casual gaming. Other specs include 32 GB of RAM and a high-speed PCIe 4.0 SSD. This type of storage loads files, apps, and your operating system much faster than older hard drives. It uses a newer, faster connection (PCIe 4.0) that allows your computer to access data more quickly, which means shorter loading times and smoother 75Wh battery and efficient chip contribute to long battery life, with the standard version lasting about 13.4 hours in web browsing tests. The 13.3-inch OLED display offers a sharp resolution of 2880 x 1800, although it maxes out at 60Hz and 400 nits brightness, which may feel modest compared to some competitors. The laptop weighs only 2.18 pounds (about 1 kg), has a thickness of 0.67 inches (1.7 cm), and includes a 5MP webcam, two Thunderbolt 4 USB-C ports, a USB-A port, HDMI 2.1, and a microSD card reader. Pricing and release details for the Ukiyo-e Edition have not yet been announced, but it's expected to be a limited release.
The Verge
20-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Verge
MSI put The Great Wave on the lid of a limited edition laptop.
MSI is no stranger to putting wild designs on its laptops, but the Prestige 13 AI Plus Ukiyo-e Edition is classing things up with a an eight-layer lacquered print of Hokusai's wave on its lid. The iconic Japanese artwork is applied by hand in eight steps, and the individually numbered laptops have piano gloss keys with golden legends to complete the sophisticated look. It's $1,599 and limited to 1,000 units. 1/7
