Morning glories

A Japanese reverence for nature found a sympathetic medium in kachōga or kachō-e, ‘bird and flower pictures’ or here, woodblock prints. The genre has a long pedigree, maintaining metaphoric associations – the crane (tsuru) signifying longevity, for example, and the swallow (tsubame) suggesting good fortune. Though these associations survive today, 20th-century artists favoured these subjects because they afforded intimate insights into the profound beauty of nature.
Where Shōson's depiction of birds - five of which are currently in Te Papa's collection - are soft, painterly and atmospheric, the flower designs of Shōdō Kawarazaki are crisp, sharply delineated and botanically correct, as in these Morning glories. In some ways, their fine observation drew on kachōga precedents; earlier flower prints often had their botanical detail clearly labelled like textbook diagrams. In Shōdo's s designs, however, their precision is complemented by a decorative linear elegance, exemplified in the tendrils and blooms of the morning glories - and no doubt the artist also responded to their intense blueness. Barely a decade later, but in a very different cosmos, finely wrought idioms like these would be adopted by the flowerpower poster designers of San Francisco.

Source: David Bell and Mark Stocker, 'Rising sun at Te Papa: the Heriot collection of Japanese art', Tuhinga, 29 (2018), https://collections.tepapa.govt.nz/document/10608

Dr Mark Stocker   Curator, Historical International Art    May 2019