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Visitors fortunate enough to have seen "The Moon Has No Home" were introduced to a striking new perspective on an art form that has enthralled interested viewers since the 1854 opening of Japan to the West. The show's very title hints at something different. "The Moon Has No Home" is a line of a poem found on a print, Lady Chiyo, by the 19th-century artist Tsukioka Yoshitoshi. Not all connoisseurs of Japanese prints would consider Yoshitoshi or the period in which he worked important in the history of woodblock prints. Yoshitoshi's creation of disturbing and lyrical images has led many authorities to consider him a decadent, a figure associated with the decline of Ukiyo-e. Hence the show's very title tells us that this installation is not just a presentation of prints—it is an interpretation, and a revisionist one at that.While the exhibition's title hints obliquely at a revision, the catalogue's two essays make this aim emphatic. In the first essay, "Bringing Home the Changes: The Implications of New Views of Ukiyo-e on Their American Study," Sandy Kita, assistant professor of art at the University of Maryland, makes a strong case for rethinking traditional views of Japanese woodblock prints. Kita calls for a reconsideration of basic issues and assumptions such as the definition of Ukiyo, the nature of this art, and the validity of certain prevailing estimations. The term Ukiyo-e translates to "uki," floating, "yo," world, "e," pictures—thus, pictures of the floating world. But what is this world? Richard Lane, author of one of the most authoritative studies of Japanese prints, Images from the Floating World: The Japanese Print (1978), declares that Ukiyo refers to the brothel and theater district of Edo. Its art, by extension, is a representation of the area's principal inhabitants—actors and courtesans, precisely what most of us envision when we think of Japanese prints. But this, as Kita demonstrates, is a very narrow definition of Ukiyo, one which delimits considerably the subject matter of the prints.
