Presentation 2

Against the Grain: Untraditional Explorations, Interpretations
and Extrapolations of Japanese Woodblock Prints
Mｒ. Stephen Salel
Robert F. Lange Foundation Curator of Japanese Art, Honolulu Museum of Art
ProfileStephen Salel is the Robert F. Lange Foundation Curator of Japanese Art at
the Honolulu Museum of Art. Mr. Salel received his MA in Art History fromthe University of Washington, Seattle, where he specialized in early modernJapanese painting. His curatorial portfolio includes a series of exhibitions onJapanese erotic art (shunga), which he co-curated with Curator of Asian Art
Shawn Eichman, as well as a series of exhibitions on Japanese graphic novels(manga). Mr. Salel’s publications include the book Shunga: Stages of Desire(Skira Rizzoli Publications, October 2014), which he co-authored with Dr.
Eichman.

This presentation focuses on current strategies for presenting Japanese art at the Honolulu
Museum of Art and the reasons why those strategies may differ from those at other institutions,including those within Japan. In particular, I’d like to discuss how the Honolulu Museum of Art’saudience and the growth of its collection have necessitated the development of exhibitions that
explore, interpret, and extrapolate from its print collection in novel ways.
The Honolulu Museum of Art was founded by Ms. Anna Rice Cooke, the daughter of a
missionary family in the late 19th century. It was originally Ms. Cooke’s home, and in 1927, after
amassing a large collection of art from all over the world, she decided to convert it into a museum,
which she called the Honolulu Academy of Arts.
The layout of the museum has evolved over the past 93
years, but for the past few decades, the art has been arranged
according to cultures and divided geographically. The Asianwing of the museum includes a Korean art gallery, the Maurice
J. Sullivan Family Gallery of Chinese Art, the Robert F. Lange
Foundation Gallery for Japanese Prints, the Atsuhiko & Ina
Goodwin Tateuchi Foundation Gallery of Japanese Art, and avenue for Pan-Asian Buddhist creations, all of which surround aChinese courtyard.
The museum serves two distinct audiences: theThe Atsuhiko & Ina Goodwin Tateuchi
ethnically diverse local community of Honolulu and its tourist
Foundation Gallery of Japanese Art, Honolulu
population. It was to this first audience that Anna Rice Cooke
Museum of Art
dedicated the museum in 1927. In her mission statement, she
expressed her hope of alleviating the sense of cultural isolation that local residents felt due to thegeographic isolation of Hawaii: the museum was designed so that “our children of manynationalities and races… may receive an intimation of their own cultural legacy and wake to theideals embodied in the arts of their neighbors ...”
Although the population to which she referred to at that time was almost entirely Hawaiian,
the ethnic makeup of Honolulu has since changed dramatically. More than half of the residents areAsian-American, about one-sixth are Caucasian, an equal number are multiracial, and theHawaiian population is now a mere 8 percent. When you look at the nationality of tourists who visit
Honolulu, there’s a very different breakdown. Over half are from the United States, 13% are from

Japan, and 6% are from Canada. These two surveys reveal that the visitors to our institution
include people with a wide variety of cultural references when viewing works of Japanese art.
The collecting strategies of the museum’s founder and its donors, particularly their interestin Japanese woodblock prints, have been of inestimable influence. The three most active collectors
have been Ms. Cooke, the author James Michener, and Richard Lane, who was both a Japanese
literature scholar and a private art dealer. Ms. Cooke challenged the prevalent definition ofJapanese printmaking by collecting modern shin-hanga prints by western artists who she
personally knew: Charles Bartlett,Elizabeth Keith, Bertha Lum, and Paul Jacoulet. Michener’s collection of approximately 6,000
works was a combination of classical works of ukiyo-e and modern Japanese prints. Among thosewoodcuts is largest collection of Hiroshige prints in the world. As a literature scholar, Lane amasseda very large collection of woodblock-printed books. Thanks to him, we have a large number ofremarkably early books by Nishikawa Sukenobu and Hishikawa Moronobu, among others.
The Honolulu Museum of Art’s large collection ofJapanese prints obliges its curators to explore that collection
thoroughly and to display works that viewers are not particularlyfamiliar with. Some of these artists have been overlooked
because of their ethnicity or their national identity. Because of
Honolulu’s demographics, this is a topic of particular socialrelevance. From August through October of 2016, wepresented the non-objective abstract prints of Uchima Ansei, aJapanese-American artist born and raised in Los Angeles who,
through the encouragement of Michener and other American
Uchima Ansei (1921–2000)
collectors, moved to Japan and integrated into the JapaneseSong of the Seashore
print community in Tokyo.
United States, 1957
Though our audience may not share a common cultural Woodblock print; ink and color on paper
background, their familiarity with contemporary political
Gift of James A. Michener, 1983 (18865)
discourse has encouraged us to interpret early modern prints
through the lens of contemporary discussions. In an exhibition
called Hiroshige’s City: From Edo to Tokyo, presented fromFebruary through August 2016, we discussed how Hiroshige’s
series One Hundred Famous Views of Edo could be sequenced
in a way that showed the urbanization of Japan’s capitol. Theexhibition concluded with works by two contemporary
Japanese artists, the lithographer Motoda Hisaharu and thevideo artist Yoshimura Ayako, both of whom discussed theaftermath of over-urbanization.
Another contemporary topic that works of ukiyo-e
Installation view, Hiroshige’s City: From Edo toaddress is sexology and the evolving attitudes about sexuality
Tokyo,
within a particular culture. Inspired by the numerous works of
Honolulu Museum of Art,
shunga – Japanese erotic art – that Richard Lane had collected, February 2016 – August, 2016
and in collaboration with Shawn Eichman, the Curator of Asianart, I organized a series of exhibitions on this topic. The first,
The Arts of the Bedchamber: Japanese Shunga, was held fromNovember 2012 through March 2013. This explored erotic
works from the late 17th and 18th centuries. The second
exhibition, shown from November 2013 through March 2014,
was called Tongue in Cheek: Erotic Art in 19th-Century Japan.
And the series concluded with Modern Love: 20th-Century
Japanese Erotic Art, on display from November 2014 throughMarch 2015. Several works we included in this final show weremanga – contemporary graphic novels.
Installation view, Arts of the Bedchamber:
The topic of manga leads to my final strategy. After theJapanese Shunga,
Meiji Restoration, the technical tradition of ukiyo-e continues
Honolulu Museum of Art,through the shin-hanga and sōsaku hanga movements. TheNovember 23, 2012 – March 17, 2013

populist tradition of ukiyo-e, however, is more clearly seen in modern manga, and so I have beenpresenting exhibitions of manga as an extrapolation of our ukiyo-e print collection.
The first manga exhibition at the Honolulu Museum of Art, from August 2016 throughJanuary 2017, was Visions of Gothic Angels: Japanese Manga by Takaya Miou. The next show
was The Disasters of Peace: Social Discontent in the Manga of Tsuge Tadao and Katsumata
Susumu, held from November 2017 through April 2018. These were works by two artists whoworked in the genre of alternative manga and who published in the magazine Garo. The final
manga exhibition, which I am currently preparing, is scheduled for March through July of 2021. It isentitled EmPOWered! How Women Revolutionized Japanese Manga. It deals with shōjo manga(comic art for adolescent women), josei manga (graphic novels for adult women), and the way
those genres reflect developments in the women’s rights movement both within Japan andinternationally.
These curatorial strategies at the Honolulu Museum of Art admittedly differ from theapproach to Japanese art history seen in museums within Japan. Nevertheless, they are intended
to represent Japan’s history and culture accurately and respectfully while reflecting the cultural
diversity of Honolulu’s community and the insights of the museum’s most significant patrons.