As a sakura tree on the banks of the tranquil Sumida River unfurls its delicate pink blossoms to the first blush of spring, my heart also opens to the gentle nudge of nostalgia. Japan, my lifelong home and the cradle of my deepest passions has always been a symphony of transient beauty that whispers the language of ukiyo-e, the Floating World of art. This intimate language that has embedded itself into the fabric of my life as an art curator, is the key to unlocking the layered nuances of Andras Ikladi’s Floating World.
It is, however, essential to note the unique challenge posed by writing about photography, particularly when one’s expertise lies in the ancient realm of traditional printmaking. But it’s a worthy effort, as Stephen Shore notes in his seminal work, The Nature of Photographs: “Japanese woodblock prints use the frame in a way that is more reminiscent of photographs than of Western painting […] Perhaps by examining what gives these prints their sense of photographic framing we can clarify what photographic framing is.” This parallel between the framing techniques in ukiyo-e and photography provides an exciting, albeit challenging point of departure when approaching the body of work in the present book as it relates to traditional Japanese printmaking.
Standing at the nexus of these two art forms, I find my heart fluttering with the anticipatory thrill of a kabuki actor before the curtain rises. It is within the delicate interplay of light, shadow, and form that the true beauty of Ikladi’s work reveals itself.
The city of Edo (Tokyo) stands as a testament to the transformative power of time. Once a bastion of the chonin — the burgeoning merchant class — it played host to the birth of ukiyo-e, literally “Pictures of the Floating World.”
The Floating World was a peculiar oasis within the landscape of Edo. While the Tokugawa Shogunate despised the chonin, viewing their newfound wealth and influence with suspicion, it granted the creation of an excluded pleasure district, a veritable sanctuary from the rigid conventions of feudal Japan. Here, geishas danced to the rhythm of the shamisen, kabuki theatre dazzled with its colourful tapestry of drama, and artists painted the scenes of revelry to be imprinted and distributed on paper. This was the stage upon which ukiyo-e was born, shaped by the unconventional forms of theatre, literature, and the milieu of the chonin class.
However, as history would have it, ukiyo-e came under the critical eye of censorship in the late 1700s. Despite these societal pressures, the legacy of ukiyo-e and the spirit of the Floating World remained undeterred, persisting even today in the works of contemporary artists.
The beauty of the Japanese language is its ability to balance gracefully on the knife-edge of nuance, where each ideograph can sway between myriad meanings, dependent on the tender whims of context. Ukiyo-e, the art form integral to this exploration of Ikladi’s Floating World, is a testament to this linguistic dance.
Each of the three ideographs in ukiyo-e holds its own story, adding depth to the richness of the Floating World. Uki represents floating, cheerful, and frivolous, while yo signifies the world, generation, or era, and finally -e denotes picture or drawing. At first glance, ukiyo-e translates to the “pictures of the floating, cheerful world.”
However, like the shadowy depths of a moonlit lake, ukiyo-e hides a profound duality beneath its surface. The ideograph uki can also signify “sorrow, grief, distress, and melancholy,” painting the Floating World in hues of poignant sadness. This alternate translation, the “sorrowful world,” aligns with the Buddhist notion of impermanence, adding an undertone of transience to the cheerful frivolity of ukiyo-e.
This intriguing juxtaposition of pleasure and sorrow within the same art form serves as the point of departure for understanding Ikladi’s work. His photographs, like the ukiyo-e prints of the Edo period, traverse the expanse of human experience — moving from the euphoria of a stolen moment to the melancholy of fleeting time, from the cheerful, buoyant world to the sorrowful world steeped in Buddhist philosophy, and the surreality of the everyday.
Apart from the parallel presence of multiple layers of emotions, we can also observe a semiotic duality in these works. Plato, by emphasising the non-mimetic qualities of art, urged us to think of ideals rather than things in themselves. The tension between representing reality and the deliberate distortion of it in ukiyo-e parallels the interplay often seen in street photography.
Ukiyo-e has a multitude of visual tools that help to elevate the expression from description to implication by creating a somewhat floating image plane that suggests a feeling of anti-gravity that’s also characteristic of both Christian and Eastern religious art, like the Buddhist-themed thangka of Tibet.
By carefully using tensions and explicitly dominant vertical support, the image plane becomes less of a view and more of a surface to look at, revealing formal relationships.
In photography, the distanced observer’s view the 50mm lens creates allows less of a “rendering effect,” a space closer to traditional painting and illustration, a neutral image and a conscious diversion away from referring to the more representational, narrative-driven style of the NY street photography school of the 1960s onwards.
A prominent element in ukiyo-e is the emphasis on negative space. This technique of depicting subjects as “floating” in the frame without a defined spatial orientation often lets viewers focus solely on the subject, fostering a deeper contemplation of its unique qualities. This isolation of subjects mirrors Ikladi’s minimalist approach, where he simplifies and isolates his subjects to emphasise their essence.
The material and tactile parallels are also interesting. During woodblock printing, a replication process, the original painting gets carved into a series of cherry-wood blocks and finally transferred onto rice paper, creating colour layers where the flat areas of the wood touch the paper and a unifying texture of paint marks and paper texture bring all together.
The black and white 35mm format works similarly for this visual approach. The smaller film size affords less descriptive power both in terms of graphical detail and tones, contributing to a more mysterious outcome. The lack of gradation also helps to maintain the breadth, the broad effect of the image by combining neighbouring large patches of light and dark into larger structures on the image plane.
The black and white film offers another step of abstraction: apart from cropping, scaling and flattening reality on the paper, by removing colour, what remains is only the colour of our dreams: black, white and the greys in-between.
Finally, grain, the smallest visual element of the print, serves a dual purpose: first, like the texture of the Japanese rice paper, it helps to unify the features of the composition. Secondly, it is the smallest compositional element, adding yet another step of abstraction from reality, almost like looking at the image through a veil.
The artistic focus of ukiyo-e prints and Ikladi’s photography share further similarities: both forms, realising the shortcoming of the single picture in storytelling, seek to tell stories through images in sequences, each image capable of standing alone as a discrete artwork yet contributing to a larger narrative when seen as part of a whole.
Both mie — the dramatic pose struck by a kabuki actor at a climactic point in the story — and “the decisive moment” share the essence of a fleeting, pivotal moment frozen in time, providing heightened emotional resonance, and serving as exclamation marks in Ikladi’s story of his version of Ukiyo.
As I draw my exploration of the parallels between Andras Ikladi’s photography and the world of ukiyo-e to a close, I find myself fascinated by the unity of human expression across time and space. Despite differences in medium, culture, and era, both artists of Japan and Andras Ikladi strive to encapsulate the fleeting essence of life, capturing the Floating World that surrounds us all.
Rachel Wang
Tokyo, Japan
2023.05.12