An homage to and artistic interpretation of Ando Hiroshige’s famous woodblock print, Evening Snow at Kanbara.
Evening Snow at Kanbara (1834) by Ando Hiroshige is a woodblock print in the artist’s famous series, The Fifty-three Stations of the Tōkaidō. Kanbara-juku, the village shown in the print, was the 50th of these stations, situated along a road frequently traveled by wealthy tourists during the Edo Period in Japan. Each station provided services to travelers as well as government offices for the processing of papers that would allow tourists to continue on their journey.
Many critics have remarked on the strangeness of the scene as pictured by Hiroshige. The climate of the actual Kanbara-juke is temperate and rarely receives any snow, and, apparently, the artist’s depiction bore little if any resemblance to the village as it stood in the 1830s. The spirit of Meisho (“famous places”), however, is a literary one, so it is clear that Hiroshige is claiming a poetic sense of the place rather than a faithful one. It is as if the artist is imposing a heavy snowfall on this post station in a kind of visual cruelty party thrown for people much more acclimated to balmy weather. The three figures, literally stooped over by the weight of the snow, struggle on a steep slope. One of them is elderly and walks with a cane down the slippery hill. Behind, the houses are dark, and we have to ask what these three are doing outside on what must be one of the worst nights of the year.
Hiroshige’s humor and the license he takes with the idea of place are what I admire about his work. The artist’s draftsmanship is undeniable as are his compositions, but it is the distorting lens that Hiroshige applies to his subject matter that interests me the most. His “sense of place” is fanciful, one constructed not only by what is seen but also by what is thought. In Hiroshige, the poetic rules the landscape, and the place becomes merely a framework upon which to hang ideas that push the depiction of space into the complex field of representation with all of its attendant reflexivity.
In homage to the print-maker’s brilliance, I created my own version of Evening Snow at Kanbara by taking apart the elements of the print and offering them as a collection of “official” records bound together by a poly envelope, the kind of container frequently used in publishing outfits for transmitting book components that need to be proofread and approved for publication.
Critical to the original print are the three figures making their way through the snow, so the first set of records that I created were of the print’s protagonists.
I wanted to think about what their individual responses to the unlikely snow might have been and so styled each figure differently to reflect a unique psychological state. Each of the three objects is simultaneously a representation of the figure and a processed record of the individual’s passing through the Kanbara-juku station at the moment depicted in Hiroshige’s print.
Woodblock prints often feature the title of the work either inscribed directly on the picture or formatted inside of a cartouche that is located somewhere within the composition. My version of the title cartouche clearly wasn’t proofread.
In Japanese woodblock prints from the Edo era, Shogunate approval was required for publication and distribution of the work. This system of approval was governed by committees who examined each submission according to what are called Sumptuary Edicts, which was a complex system of rules for determining whether a print was appropriate for publication. Final approval is indicated by a censor’s seal called kiwame (“approved”) or aratame (“examined”), which is affixed to the print itself. I have included one of these seals inside of the envelope to verify that all of the records contained within have been approved (though by what governing body it is difficult to say).
Lastly, I created records for the structures and the scenery found around the post station itself. These records serve to document the way that the illusion of depth was created in the original work. Interestingly, Hiroshige’s technique of rendering depth through graphical perspective was influenced by Dutch artwork that had made its way to the then isolated Japan though heavily monitored trade between the two countries. My rendering is much more fragmentary in that it breaks the principles of landscape composition down into their constituent parts for recording and documentation purposes.
