Shadows of Light

In 2026, the Mitsubishi Ichigokan Museum in Tokyo will present the exhibition Twilight, New Prints: From Kobayashi Kiyochika to Kawase Hasui, which traces the history of Japanese landscape prints through the theme of twilight. Beginning with Kobayashi Kiyochika’s 1876 views of Tokyo, known as “light paintings” for their unprecedented use of deep shadows and sudden glimmers, the show evokes the melancholy of a world fading with the end of the Edo Era. This sensibility reemerges in the rise of shin-hanga at the start of the twentieth century, a movement that revived the techniques and spirit of ukiyo-e to reinterpret the landscapes of modern Japan. Through works by Yoshida Hiroshi and Kawase Hasui, drawn from the Robert O. Muller Collection at the Smithsonian, the exhibition reveals how twilight became a metaphor for the passage between tradition and modernity, capturing the fragile moment where memory meets the desire for a new vision.