Overview

Taiso Yoshitoshi (1839-1892) was fascinated by the supernatural, and some of his best work concerns ghosts, monsters, and charming animal transmutations. Yoshitoshi's strange tales presents two series (with full page illustrations) that focus on his depictions of the weird and magical world of the transformed. The first series is One Hundred Tales of Japan and China (Wakan hyaku monogatari, 1865) and it is based on a game in which people told short scary ghost tales in a darkened room, extinguishing a candle as each tale ended. New Forms of Thirty-six Strange Things (Shinken sanjurokkaisen) of 1889-92 illustrates stories from Japan's rich heritage of legends in more serene and objective ways.

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9789074822718

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Yoshitoshi's Strange Tales is an artbook of woodblock prints by Taiso Yoshitoshi (1839-1892), one of the most poplular Japnese woodblock artists of his time, especially well-known for his works concerning supernatural events, ghosts, monsters, and animal transformations. Focusing particularly upon two series of Yoshitoshi's woodblock prints that illustrated the fantastic world of the transformed, Yoshitoshi's Strange Tles pairs a full-page color image of each selected print with a page-long description of the print's history, and a brief summary of the folk story that the print illustrates, written by Asian art expert John Stevenson. An esoteric and eye-catching addition to artbook shelves and especiallly recommended for connoisseurs of 19th-century Japanese art --Wisconisin Book Watch

Author Information

After graduating from Oxford at the age of twenty, John Stevenson worked in the USA and Nigeria. He lived for twenty years in Asia and has written on several areas of Asian art. He is the author Vietnamese Ceramics: A Separate Tradition; Irrawaddy: Benevolent River of Burma; Masami Teraoka: The Floating World Comes of Age; Japanese Kite Prints and a number of books on the work of Yoshitoshi, including Yoshitoshi's One Hundred Aspects of the Moon. He has served as acting curator of Chinese art at Seattle Art Museum, and now works in book production.

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