Today, Japanese ukiyo-e prints hang in museums and private collections around the world. Works by Hokusai and Hiroshige have become some of the most recognizable images in Japanese art. But that is not how ukiyo-e began.
These were pictures made for a growing urban audience. They portrayed the things people wanted to see: celebrated kabuki actors, fashionable women, famous landscapes, popular stories, legendary heroes and places they might someday visit. They were produced commercially and, unlike unique paintings, could be printed in substantial numbers. The Metropolitan Museum of Art describes Edo-period woodblock prints as popular images made in quantity for the increasingly prosperous townspeople of Japan.
The term ukiyo-e (浮世絵) is usually translated as “pictures of the floating world.” That floating world was one of entertainment, fashion, theatre, pleasure and the experiences of urban life. The Bai Win Collection offers a remarkable opportunity to enter that world through the prints themselves.
