'Seishi' by Yoshida Hiroshi, 1940. This image is also available on:
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This print shows a street in the Chinese town of Xingzi, known in Japanese as Seishi (from the Japanese pronunciation of the Chinese characters), and incorporated today into Lushan City. The town lies a few miles to the south of Lushan Mountain (or Mount Lu); considered one of the ancient spiritual centers of China, the region contains an array of Buddhist and Taoist temples and important Confucian sites.
In 1940 Xingzi had been under Japanese occupation for two years, along with much of eastern China. Yoshida Hiroshi, now 63 years old, toured China in 1940 as a military artist; having built up a reputation as a leading artist of the Shin-Hanga style and with extensive experience of international travel, he was a natural choice to chronicle Japan's new conquests. However, unlike other military artists who focused on the heroism of the troops and flashy battle scenes, Yoshida preferred to capture the everyday life of China's people. For a Japanese man raised in a rapidly modernizing country, visiting China would have been like stepping back in time, as most of the country had yet to industrialize and daily life carried on much as it had for centuries. The poverty would have been shocking as well; the lack of economic development had only been made worse by the decades of civil war that had followed the fall of the last Qing emperor in 1910. The gateways Yoshida shows here are beautiful, but there is a touch of faded glory to them, and even in the simplistic Shin-Hanga style he captures how run-down the streets look, picturesque verging into ruins. This is the last gasp of old China, before the Communist Party took control of the country and - for better or worse - swept away much of the past during the Cultural Revolution. Mourn it or not, this print is an invaluable historical record of the last years of a way of life that had endured for millennia, as well as a beautiful piece of art in its own right.
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