"The Art of Transformation: Illuminating Japan’s Industrial Revolution with Nishiki-e Prints" Exhibition
The Nippon Gallery
This event has ended.
This exhibit features over fifty color woodblock reprints from the Shibusawa Memorial Foundation and celebrates the 100th anniversary of the first large-scale business mission to the United States, led by Baron Eiichi Shibusawa in 1909. Each of the prints captures the dynamic encounter of cultures that began when Commodore Perry’s Black Ships anchored in Tokyo Bay in 1853, ending Japan’s centuries of seclusion. The images reveal the foundations of Japan’s modern infrastructure, manufacturing, and urbanization that this meeting of cultures put into motion, while also showing the effects of the industrial revolution on the everyday lives of the Japanese people. Historic images and articles highlighting the Japanese Commercial Commission’s trip to the United States will accompany these vibrant works of art, exemplifying the transformation and exchange of cultures that took place during the Meiji and Taisho eras of Japan. The mission made news around the country as Baron Shibusawa and more than 50 of Japan’s most prominent business leaders and notables traveled to fifty-three cities over the course of four months.
[Image: "Famous Sites in Tokyo: Horse-drawn Street Railway Passing Yokoyama-cho Street, Ryogoku" Courtesy of Shibusawa Memorial Museum]
Media
Schedule
from January 28, 2010 to February 24, 2010