Centered on the ukiyo-e collection of the Machida City Museum of Graphic Arts, this exhibition presents comic prints from the late Edo and Meiji eras.
Alongside Utagawa Hiroshige’s “Fifty-Three Stations of the Tokaido (Hoeido edition),” the roughly 250 works on view across two rotating halves include comic prints such as Utagawa Kuniyoshi’s “He Looks Fierce but He’s Actually a Very Nice Person,” built from a face composed of many smaller figures, along with catfish prints, measles prints, satirical cartoons from the late Edo period, Shosai Ikkei’s kaika-e prints of the new Meiji era and Kobayashi Kiyochika’s ponchi-e social satire cartoons.
Even during the turbulent Bakumatsu and Meiji periods, marked by earthquakes, epidemics and the Boshin War, comic ukiyo-e continued to make people laugh — the exhibition traces that history and the social conditions behind it through the works on display.
