Edos Traum -  Mitsunori Kitsunai

 

What if the people and animals from the works of Edo-period artists could cross the boundaries of time and suddenly step into our world today?

MIKIKO SATO GALLERY is pleased to present Edos Traum (Edo’s Dream), a solo exhibition by Mitsunori Kitsunai.

he Edo period (1603–1868) was one of the most culturally and artistically vibrant eras in Japanese history. Painting and the visual arts, including ukiyo-e woodblock prints, flourished during this time. Alongside scenes of everyday life and landscapes, artists depicted animals, yōkai, and fantastic creatures with remarkable vitality.

For many years, Mitsunori Kitsunai has been fascinated by the free and inventive imagination found in Edo-period painting, drawing on it to develop a distinctive pictorial world of his own.

An important encounter in Kitsunai’s artistic development took place in 2005 at the Kyoto National Museum, where he saw works by Soga Shōhaku (1730–1781). He was particularly fascinated by a work in which Shōhaku added his own brushstrokes to a painting by an earlier artist and even placed his own artist’s seal on it. Such an act could have been considered remarkably bold and even disrespectful at the time—and might still be seen that way today. Yet Shōhaku took this freedom with striking confidence and ease.

Kitsunai sees his own method of placing flat, two-dimensional figures into everyday scenes where they might at first seem out of place as a homage to artists of the past who gave themselves the freedom to paint in their own way.

In the exhibition Edos Traum, figures and animals that seem to have stepped out of Katsushika Hokusai’s Hokusai Manga and the works of Kawanabe Kyōsai find themselves wandering into our contemporary everyday world. Here, they play, work, and pause for a moment’s rest. From these encounters across different times and worlds emerge stories that feel at once familiar, slightly mysterious, and full of humor.

Rather than simply quoting or reproducing Edo-period painting, Kitsunai draws on the rich imagination that gave rise to this visual world and translates it into a new form of painting from a contemporary perspective. The people and animals inhabiting his works appear entirely at home, as though they had always lived there.

In Edos Traum, the rich imagination of the Edo period quietly encounters our everyday world. We warmly invite you to discover this world for yourself.