Tokyo, Elegance, and the Question of Homage: Notes on Exhibiting
- Edward Luper
- 2 days ago
- 4 min read
The possibility of showing work in Tokyo unfolded slowly, over almost two years. Shoko-san of Gallery Sumire first contacted me after coming across my work on Instagram via recommendation from another artist, and suggested we meet while she was in London. We met at the Landmark Hotel and spoke at length about printmaking, Japanese art, and how my work might sit within a Tokyo context. At that stage, nothing was fixed, and it was not immediately clear how, or even whether, the conversation would move forward.
What was clear from the beginning, however, was that the question was not simply what to show, but how. When an artist whose work is deeply shaped by ukiyo-e shows in Tokyo, the risk of surface homage is always present. The challenge lies in how to acknowledge influence without slipping into pastiche: how to work with a tradition rather than merely slavishly quoting it. This was the question in my mind anwyay that I was trying to tackle...
Hiroshige, Irises, and the BT Tower
One of the works in the exhibition, BT Tower Beneath Daffodils, engages most directly with ukiyo-e precedent. It was conceived in dialogue with Hiroshige’s Irises at Horikiri, a print I have long admired for its poetic elegance and quiet compositional confidence. What moves me in that image is not simply its subject, but its structure: the way a dense foreground of flowers dominates the picture plane, while architecture and human presence recede into distance and atmosphere.
In translating this to London, the BT Tower takes on a comparable role. It is unmistakably modern, yet oddly neutral, a fixed vertical presence around which the city’s daily and seasonal rhythms unfold. The daffodils function less as symbols than as markers of time, signalling the arrival of spring and the passage of the year. The intention was to enter into a conversation with Hiroshige across place and century. This image was ultimately realised as a screen print, a medium that allowed for the flatness, clarity, and controlled colour that felt essential to its mood.
Against Kitsch Pastiche
For the other works, I was very conscious of not wanting to rely on overt ukiyo-e quotation. The world does not need another Great Wave repurposed as a visual joke, or a historic composition updated through simple substitution rather than necessity. What interests me far more is the spirit of ukiyo-e: its elegance, restraint, and compositional intelligence, rather than its surface vocabulary.
In my own work, modern structures appear not as stand-ins for historical symbols, but as the fixed points around which contemporary life quietly turns. The aim is not cleverness, but inevitability: that the image could not have been made any other way.
Komura Settai and a Modern Elegance
In thinking about how to achieve this, I have often returned to artists who themselves stood at moments of transition. One such figure is Komura Settai, whose work I greatly admire. Working in early twentieth-century Tokyo, Settai combined the elegance and refinement of nihonga with the graphic clarity and compositional daring of ukiyo-e. His images feel neither nostalgic nor aggressively modern; instead, they occupy a poised middle ground, deeply rooted in tradition yet unmistakably of their own time.
What I find most compelling in Settai’s work is that he was not attempting to revive the past. He was extending it; searching for a new elegance appropriate to modern urban life. That ambition felt especially relevant when thinking about how to depict London.
London in Rain and Blossom
In St Paul’s in the Rain, the subject is not the cathedral as monument, but the rhythm of umbrellas moving through weather. Pattern and repetition come to the fore, while the building itself sits back, anchoring the composition without dominating it. Similarly, Cherry Blossoms at Hanover Square is more about atmosphere: the fleeting softness of blossom set against urban geometry, and the quiet pleasure of seasonal change within the city.
For these works, I deliberately avoided title cartouches, borders, or other overt ukiyo-e framing devices. I wanted the images to stand on their own, without signalling their references too loudly. The intention was absorption rather than quotation; allowing the lessons of Japanese print design to shape decisions about balance, pattern, and tone without announcing themselves.
There was, initially, some feeling that these works were “not homage enough.” For me, that hesitation was reassuring. It suggested that the images were not performing Japanese-ness, but had arrived at something more internalised. I am glad they are not copies with a slight update. What I value most in ukiyo-e is not its recognisability, but its grace and atmosphere.
A Circle, Not a Conclusion
I feel deeply honoured that work so strongly shaped by Japanese art is being shown in Tokyo, the former Edo, the home of Hokusai and Hiroshige, and the place where so much of this visual language first took form. To show these works there does not feel like an arrival, nor a circle closing, but part of a longer movement back and forth between East and West.
My own position sits within a much older European tradition of Japonisme: not as imitation, but as sustained looking, translation, and return. If there is nostalgia in this work, it is not for a recoverable past, but for a way of seeing, one grounded in elegance, restraint, and attention to the everyday. These are qualities that continue to travel, to be reinterpreted, and to find new forms.
This exhibition marks a moment along that path. Not a conclusion, and certainly not a claim to continuity, but an acknowledgement of influence and indebtedness: and an attempt to respond with care.