Seba 

Curator: What strikes you first about this woodblock print titled "Seba" by Utagawa Hiroshige? Editor: The melancholic quiet. The moon feels less romantic here, more like an unavoidable spotlight illuminating the back-breaking work taking place on the water. There's a subtle loneliness. Curator: It’s an intriguing tension, that beauty alongside what seems like very arduous labor. It makes one consider the realities underpinning the aesthetics of ukiyo-e. Look at the layering of color. Do you think that adds to this contrast? Editor: Definitely. Notice the dark mass loaded on the boat. The process of creating such dark pigment required laborious charcoal production, didn't it? Curator: Precisely. Think of the labor, too, involved in creating the woodblocks themselves for a single print. The skilled artisan precisely translating Hiroshige's design into tangible form. These weren’t mass-produced, though the process enabled a wider circulation of images than painting. Editor: The imagery is what endures for me. I wonder, what meaning was encoded in the moon? The reeds seem symbolic, too, almost reaching to touch the lunar orb. Are they reaching for enlightenment, perhaps? What do they represent here? Curator: Perhaps more practically they could represent local materiality. This region may be rich with them, thus lending itself to printmaking’s materiality, making visible the labor required in transporting such resources for consumption in the nearby Edo. It really emphasizes that process is an intimate and interwoven cultural practice, and that everything feeds into something else. Editor: That’s true. I appreciate how this artwork, seemingly simple at first glance, contains these levels of complexity. This artwork certainly challenges the idea that art has to be divorced from practical realities and even everyday toil. Curator: Exactly. I hadn't considered the weight that object, or its creation has in the picture beyond form. Editor: A beautiful and complex layering of culture, materiality, and meaning indeed.