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Research for Week of 11/19: Ukiyo-e Shop

image credit: Tranosuke 


For this week, I researched on the traditional Ukiyo-e shop and what they looked like. I found very little information on this, but I did find an image of a replica of an Ukiyo-e shop in the Edo-Tokyo Museum. This showed multiple ways in which the work could be displayed in the shops: on flat surfaces, hung among strings, and then some were even hung alone. While this sort of cluttered display to show as many things as possible is normal to us today, it is fascinating that our ideas of mass production and how that is displayed derive from shops like this. Furthermore, I like the fact that it shows how the same images have different designs and colors and are printed many times, emphasizing the devaluation of each piece during this time (which is how it became affordable to the middle class).

For my own display, I chose to replicate the pictures hung on strings. Although they are all beautiful prints, they are forced together and forgotten because each image is mass produced and therefore loses a great deal of value. This display choice in itself is meant to comment on the infatuation that modern society has with mass production, in art and in all fields, as well as comment on the highly consumer-driven society that we live in. It will start with the best prints, and then lead down to the worst prints, prints that are so poorly made that they would be unusable. These prints will be the most accessible, sitting closer to the eyes and the hands of the viewer than the well-made prints that tower far above their heads. My hope is that it will also display the loss of quality that comes with this way of living, certainly in the quality of the products we make, but also the loss of quality of our lives when we are forced to constantly work and push ourselves in unhealthy ways in order to compete in a world that is driven by consumerism and, therefore, financial success.

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