Night Parade Of Hell Creatures: Bizarre Demonic Art By Kyosai (Ukiyo-e Master Series) - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1840683090 ISBN 13: 9781840683097

Publisher: Shinbaku Books, 2013

Synopsis

Kawanabe Kyosai (1831-89) was only 6 years old when he joined the school of the great ukiyo-e master Utagawa Kuniyoshi, along with such fellow pupils as Yoshitoshi, who followed him in 1850. Later Kyosai studied traditional Japanese painting at the Kano school. As befits this varied apprenticeship, Kyosai would embrace many styles and methods during his artistic career. His eclectic approach may also be partly attributable to a legendary sake-drinking habit, which could account for the more bizarre extremes of his chosen subject matter ― in particular, weird demons and the bloody tortures of Hell. Kyosai can now be regarded as not only one of the last true ukiyo-e masters, but also as one of the first truly modernist painters of Japan.

"Night Parade Of Hell Creatures", edited by Jack Hunter (who also edited the ground-breaking extreme ukiyo-e anthology "Dream Spectres"), collects and considers over 100 of Kyosai's most innovative, demented and bizarre images ― including multiple yokai, ghosts and demons ― presented in large-format and full-colour throughout.

The Ukiyo-e Master Series: presenting seminal collections of art by the greatest print-designers and painters of Edo-period and Meiji-period Japan.

About this title

About the Author:

Kawanabe Kyosai[ (1831―1889) was a Japanese artist, now regarded as one of Japan's greatest ever painters and print-makers.

Jack Hunter is author and editor of over 20 previous books on cinema, including EROS IN HELL and MOONCHILD, as well as the counter-culture classics FREAK BABYLON and CHAPEL OF GORE AND PSYCHOSIS. After the success of his ukiyo-e study DREAM SPECTRES (2010), he has mainly spent his time in Tokyo developing the Ukiyo-e Master Series.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

Kawanabe Kyosai (1831-1889), born with the original first name of Shusaburo, was the son of Kawanabe Kiemon, a samurai retainer. When he was only 6 years old, he joined the school of the great ukiyo-e master Utagawa Kuniyoshi, along with such fellow pupils as Yoshitoshi, who followed him in 1850. Later Kyosai studied traditional Japanese painting at the Kano school. As befits this varied apprenticeship, Kyosai would embrace many styles and methods during his artistic career. Although his primary style was manga-style sketches, he could also design stunning prints and paint in a classical style with suberb skill. His eclectic approach may be partly attributable to a legendary sake-drinking habit, which could account for the more bizarre extremes of his chosen subject matter ― in particular, weird demons and the bloody tortures of Hell. (Sadly, this habit also undoubtedly led to his premature death, aged just 58, from stomach cancer.) Kyosai is said to have acquired an added taste for the morbid and grotesque when, at the age of nine, he found a rotting severed human head in a river, which he took home and studied before his horrified parents made him dispose of it. Such severed heads can be seen explicitly referenced in two of his well-known ghost paintings of 1870, as well as in dozens of sketches showing the torments of the damned.

It was whilst at the Kano school of Maemura Towa that Kyosai acquired the infamous soubriquet Shuchu gaki ― 'Demon of painting". His self-appointed name, Kyosai ("Crazy Studio"), was derived from his own brand of bizarre art, which he dubbed kyoga ― "crazy pictures". He developed this style independently from around 1854 onwards, having been disowned by various tutors owing to his already dissolute lifestyle ― it is reported that he was already a heavy drinker and frequenter of whorehouses by the age of eighteen. Kyosai's artistic output veers from satire, shunga and base comedy to hideous monsters and extremes of gore, dismemberment and mutilation, images delivered in a protean blur of stylistic shifts across three decades. ...

About this edition

• Publisher: Shinbaku Books
• Publication date: 2013
• ISBN 10: 1840683090
• ISBN 13: 9781840683097
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 128
• Editor: Hunter Jack