Installation celebrates New Years' tradition

Lesley Ham, graduate assistant and curator at the IU Art Museum, said she has been working to identify a collection of prints by Japanese artist Utagawa Kunisada for about a year and a half.

“My job is to identify prints that we’ve had for many years, and no one has been able to identify them yet,” Ham said. “I have to identify the signature, the year it was printed, the names of the actors and if I’m lucky, what play it represents. That information’s hard to find.”

Ham recently discovered a series of five New Years’ prints by Kunisada, currently on display at the museum.

Ham said the prints were made in 1847 or 1848, when the Japanese celebrated the Lunar New Year.

Themes of shrimp, kite-flying, good luck masks and allusions to pickpockets were all printed on traditional Japanese New Year grab bags.

“Japanese language has a lot of homonyms,” said Judith Stubbs, IU professor of Japanese art. “Meaning is inherent in the character, but when you read it out loud, it suggests another connotation”

Ham often uses books from the Fine Arts Library and the Internet to identify
publisher stamps.

Stubbs said the museum acquired the Kunisada prints in 1979. The prints must have been kept in good condition prior to arriving to IU because purple dye is still visible, a color that doesn’t last long when exposed to light, Stubbs said.

“Probably these, because they’re in good condition, were in an album,” Ham said. “The collector went through all the trouble to write the name of the actors in brush. Obviously, someone was a big fan.”

The installation will be on display in the gallery until April 29.