Word: ukiyo
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...visual arts, cultural outsiders often see what insiders miss. Japanese-born painter Masami Teraoka combines elements of European art and Japanese ukiyo-e wood-block imagery. From his unique perspective, he creates gothic halos around the heads of AIDS patients and condoms in the bedrooms of samurai. In his Harlem neighborhood, Jamaican-American artist Nari Wood collects discarded baby carriages and ties them together with fire hoses, making monuments to loss...
...Japanese word ukiyo -- "the floating world" -- suggests the narrow bridges of Hiroshige or the frozen waves of Hokusai. In Kadohata's novel of the '60s, a Japanese American redefines ukiyo as the Western U.S., a place of "gas station attendants, restaurants, and jobs we depended on, the motel towns floating in the middle of fields and mountains." Kadohata has a painter's eye, and her narrator's scroll is filled with scrupulously detailed portraits -- of her tyrannical grandmother, of herself and her lovers and, memorably, of unassimilated migrant workers, like "animals migrating across a field . . . moving from the hard life...
Because they could be inexpensively reproduced, Japanese wood-block prints, or ukiyo-e, made art available to the masses. Hiroshige: Birds and Flowers (George Braziller; 192 pages; $75) presents 91 surviving color prints from a 19th century master of the form. Ando Hiroshige (1797-1858) was enormously successful with subjects more commonly portrayed in wood blocks: landscapes and scenes of urban night life. The prints of birds and flowers collected here harked back to an older Chinese tradition and became popular as well. The formula -- literally an arrangement of birds and plants -- only sounds narrow. Hiroshige's inspired variations...
Lintgen also draws the line at certain contemporary works, such as those of John Cage and Karlheinz Stockhausen. "That," says the doctor, "is not music." But he can spot such forbidding or lesser known compositions as Messiaen's Turangalila-Symphonie or Alan Hovhaness's Floating World "Ukiyo." "Those two were my best accomplishments," he says, "unless you count the time I recognized a recording of Beethoven's Fifth from across the room...
...somehow either a cause or an evidence of decadent civilization. In fact, free expression of sexual variety has been more commonly in evidence during higher historic eras of cultural expression: in the great age of the Islamic world, in several African civilizations such as Ghana, Benin and Siwan, the Ukiyo period in Japan and, of course, classical Greece, Rome, for example, fell after Christianity (and sexual shame) became dominant in the West...