Another week, another museum, this time the immersive ukiyo-e temporary exhibition in Hakata, Fukuoka. I have all summer seen advertisements on Instagram for this exhibition, and I really got tempted to go and experience this for myself. It was the last week of the exhibition when we finally made it to Hakata station. I had had plenty of time to build up my expectations, so I expected them to be squashed quite badly, but already when entering the first room of the exhibition I knew I would not be disappointed.
Ukiyo-e is a Japanese art form that was very popular from the 17th through the 19th centuries. Ukiyo-e means something like pictures of the floating world, and the paintings and woodblock prints depicts scenes from every day life, of landscapes, beautiful women, sumo wrestlers, kabuki actors, nature and other subject matters. I find ukiyo-e pictures very beautiful and I really enjoy looking at them, so coming to a room where you can enter into these images was a very all-embracing experience. The creators of the exhibition had for example breathed life into Hokusai’s famous ”The Great Wave off Kanagawa” woodblock print, and we could sit in a small room where the wave was moving over the walls and the floor was covered with images of water, accompanied by suggestiv music.
There were many exhibits, each room had its own theme and set of moving ukiyo-e images projected on the walls, and we could let ourselves get swept away, immersed in the Edo-period world. I do not know how many times I commented to my wife what an amazing exhibition this was, and we both felt so happy that we got to see the exhibition before it ended. Now, there is one more exhibition here in Fukuoka that my son and I also really want to see before the summer holidays are over, so I hope I will come back to that on this blog before long.
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