Anju Dodiya and Anne Rothenstein on Japanese Prints

Anju Dodiya: My first encounter with Japanese ukiyo-e woodblock prints was at art school, but it wasn’t an inspiring experience at all. It just seemed like some boring assignment – we had to replicate these black and white prints using traditional woodcutting tools. My head, at the time, was full of the abstract expressionists and postmodernists. I was more excited about Robert Rauschenberg than Hokusai. But after I came out of art school, I had a calendar of Japanese prints, which I loved. I knew nothing about them; there was no information about the individual works. (These were the pre-internet days!) I pinned it up in my studio, and I loved looking at it every day. During that time, my first ever body of work as an artist was a series of watercolours. When I had a big pile of them, I showed them to an artist friend, and she said that I would probably like the work of Utamaro. So that’s how I heard of Utamaro. And I loved his work. Maybe it had something to do with the images depicting women in domestic scenes. That was the beginning for me.

6 October 2025