What is Shunga?
Concepts:
A general overview of the history of Shunga, subheadings include:
- What does shunga look like?
- Why was shunga created?
- Who created shunga?
- Was early modern Japan a highly sexualised society?
- Was shunga met with resistence?
- What is shunga's significance?
Key Quotes:
“At its best, shunga celebrates the pleasures of lovemaking, in beautiful pictures that present mutual attraction and sexual desire as natural and unaffected” - Tim Clark, curator of “Shunga: Sex and Pleasure in Japanese Art”
Examples:
Most of this article is predominately fact based, and is only a brief summary of the topic, therefore not many examples are used.
Edo period (1600-1868)
The school of "ukiyo-e" ("pictures of the floating world")
Conficuian Law
Kitagawa Utamaro (died 1806)/ Katsushika Hokusai (1760-1849)
"Shunga: Sex and Pleasure in Japanese art, 1600-1900" Exhibition at the British Museum, Oct 3rd - Jan 5th, 2014
How does this relate to illustration?
Shunga is the practice of woodblock printing or ink painting onto handscrolls, typically alongside text with the purpose of illustrating.
Key texts to read:
No Laughing Matter: A Ghastly Shunga Illustration by Utagawa Toyokuni - Higuchi Kaztaka
Rethinking "Shunga": The Interpretation of Sexual Imagery of the End Period - Paul Berry
Desire in Subtext: Gender, Fandom, and Women's Male-Male Homoerotic Parodies in Contemporary Japan - Kumiko Saito
Introduction (Japan Review 26 Special Issue Shunga (2013): 3-14) - Andrew Gerstle and Timothy Clark
What is Shunga? - Artsy Editors
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