Utagawa Kuniyoshi, Sakata Kaidō-maru wrestles with a giant carp, c. 1837

A quick post to big-up the Kuniyoshi exhibition currently on at the Royal Academy of Arts in London.

I went yesterday and it totally blew me away. I was expecting an interesting exhibit, but had no idea just how impressive it would be. For one thing, there are a huge number of prints to see, ranging from standard commissions of aristocracy and beautiful ladies to political satire, portrayals of famous warriors, real and fictional, and wonderful imaginative scenes of fantasy.

Putting aside the tremendous skill it takes to draw anything this good (and for the carvers to then transplant this — kanji and all — to a wood block for printing), Utagawa Kuniyoshi’s attention to detail is astounding. His understanding of posture, composition and artistic effects is extraordinary. Many of the techniques set the groundwork for modern manga — it comes out particularly strongly in the prints portraying explosions and smoke. His strokes for conveying animal fur are uncannily realistic, and his anally retentive attention to detail, particularly for kimono patterns and tattoos remarkable.

Most striking of all is the sheer dynamism of his pictures. Each of the pictures looks so alive, simply by virtue of the pose chosen and the composition of the piece. Some epic pieces have over a dozen things going on in one frame, yet it never feels as claustrophobic, overcrowded or passive as some classical European paintings I’ve seen are. To hit the point home, there is one exhibit where Kuniyoshi deliberately used a European composition instead; it seems so much duller than the other works.

As if that weren’t enough, the room after featured ‘humourous’ and satirical works with courtesans portrayed by sparrows, octopuses (octopi?) anthropomorphised into humans and ‘ghost erotica’ featuring demon vaginas and skeleton penises (I kid you not).

Being a manga fan, I guess I shouldn’t have been so surprised at how much I loved this. But I honestly wasn’t expecting to see quite such a connection between the classic and the modern. It really cemented for me why I like Asian, and particularly Japanese, media quite so much: it’s just so much more imaginative and alive.

Beforehand, we attended the accompanying anime season at the Curzon Soho, watching Origin: Spirits of the Past. Nicely animated, but a bit of a poor man’s Nausicaa. Not a great weekend of anime watching overall, since a surprise Gonzo screening at the Barbican turned out to be Afro Samurai Resurrection, which is not really my cup of tea :p