Hokusai: The Great Picture Book of Everything

On Thursday 4^th November I went to see the Hokusai exhibition at the British Museum displaying 103 recently acquired drawings by Hokusai with the curation being led by Alfred Haft who is the Project Curator for Japanese Collections at the British Museum. Katsushika Hokusai is notorious for his piece The Great Wave off Kanagawa (or The Great Wave), 1829. The exhibition was a great opportunity to see his works beyond The Great Wave and explore the drawings that disappeared until 1948.

The exhibition itself was categorized quite well, putting together drawings used commercially, those that were based on Chinese folktale (e.g. Xiwangmu rides a royal carriage accompanied by female attendants on Mt Kunlun) and those based on Indian mythology. There was even a small section at the back focusing on the development and re-printing of The Great Wave (which resulted in 5,000 – 15,000 prints being produced). It was especially interesting to see the differences between the original prints and the modern remakes – they were such little details that you wouldn’t realise at first glance.

As the exhibition aimed to also show Hokusai’s humour and fantastical thinking through his pieces. However, because they’re monochrome and, at first glance quite subdued, I imagine that was hard to portray. To solve this, larger prints introduced each section inviting you to look at the smaller, more detailed prints and therefore being able to experience Hokusai’s visual punch. Even with glass screen between me and the piece, I could still peer in to see the smaller details; like the fine linework used as hatching in A bolt of lightning strikes Virūḍhaka dead, 1820’s-40’s creating negative space and lighter tones in the middle for the lightning bolt.

The exhibition even showed the process for his woodblock prints, which had a very easy-to-follow film with some of the equipment beside it. Having the work displayed in this order definitely helped me to understand his process better.

A controversy with the exhibition however is that some of the pieces of text may have been copied from other works of Hokusai as they don’t follow his typical style. “… I have doubts concerning the associated text page. I think that the content and style of calligraphy were copied from other works by Hokusai.” Asano Shugo, director of the Museum Yamato Bunkakan. This piece of text was displayed in the exhibit, though, along with other opinions from experts which I thought to be quite insightful especially when discussing the reliability of all these pieces when they’re from centuries ago.

One thing that must be considered is that the British Museum is the world’s largest receiver of stolen goods or artefacts*. Each piece’s description does come with a disclaimer of how the purchase was funded (example, right), however it’s important to consider how these pieces were acquired as they may in truth belong elsewhere. So, despite the British Museum’s controversial “collection of collections,” its Hokusai exhibit shines light on his unrealised works very nicely as I got the chance to learn the range of his work, his processes and how his pieces became so widely known.

*https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/nov/04/british-museum-is-worlds-largest-receiver-of-stolen-goods-says-qc

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