Yoasobi’s Gunjou : a recent ear candy and a popular duo group in Japan whose songs are all based on short stories posted on the Monogatary website operated by Song Music Japan. Catchy melody with encouraging and poetic lyrics bring me adrenaline and positivity during the installation phase of the “Life in Edo | Russel Wong in Kyoto”.

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Sanjō Bridge. Courtesy of Russel Wong.

While discussing with Russel Wong on this project, I wanted to know more about his personal journey and understand his mission in Kyoto. At the same time, I shared with him what I will be presenting through the ukiyo-e. We went through the woodblock prints together and one of the prints that caught his attention was Utagawa Hiroshige’s “Nihonbashi”, from the series “Fifty-Three stations of the Tōkaidō”.

Courtesy of the Asian Civilisations Museum

This series of prints marked the journey one would take between Edo (today’s Tokyo) and Kyoto. Each print (although titled as “Fifty-Three stations of the Tōkaidō”, there are 55 prints in this series, including the first and last stop – Edo and Kyoto) depicts a post station to mark one’s itinerary.

My perfect benzodiazepine from late 2020 to present. Coincidentally, as the title of this guqin tune suggests — the Dream of Zhuangzi – was also a central nugget for Ukiyo, the Floating World. It was an old story about Zhuangzi, a Chinese philosopher of about the 4th century BCE, who fell asleep and dreamed he was a butterfly; on waking, he could not be sure he might not now be a butterfly, asleep and dreaming it was a man. We all have waking and dreaming, but how do we know which is which? Is one definitely more certain than the other? The conundrum is ontological. During the Edo period, this subject was often featured in paintings and prints.

Despite some variations in sights and scenes on the various post stations in later editions, Hiroshige always starts with Nihonbashi in Edo and ends with the Sanjo Bridge in Kyoto. Russel told me that he is familiar with this series and is very much inspired by woodblock prints while shooting in Kyoto.

He showed me his photograph of the Sanjo Bridge at the location where he imagined Hiroshige would have gotten his inspiration to produce his prints. I immediately felt that that was the link. The two bridges along the Tōkaidō route through a Edo-period woodblock print and a contemporary photograph that allow us to travel across time and space.

J.S.Bach’s Mass in B Minor or any of Bach’s harpsichord concertos – always work for me when I am organising my thoughts and particularly helpful during the preparation phase for my exhibitions.

Akafuku is a famous traditional sweet made and sold in Ise.

During the lockdown phase last year, I was out-stationed in Japan for a period of time. It enabled me to have a series of discussions with the co-organisers — Kobe Shimbun — who had kindly facilitated work meetings to discuss how we could present the woodblock prints to our Singapore audience. The initial idea was to present ukiyo-e through 5 Master Artists – Utamaro, Sharaku, Hokusai, Hiroshige, and Kuniyoshi. It was a fabulous idea however, I felt that we could attempt another perspective to challenge the conventional way to present ukiyo-e to our Singaporean audience.

Nihonbashi: Morning scene by Utagawa Hiroshige. Courtesy of Nakau Collection.