Reserved for Buddhist seals and images for centuries, ukiyo-e is a genre of Japanese art that emerged and flourished from the 17th through 19th centuries. The term ukiyo-e translates as “picture of the floating world”. Produced on woodblock prints, its artists represented subjects as female beauties; kabuki actors and sumo wrestlers; scenes from history and folk tales; travel scenes and landscapes; flora and fauna; and erotica.

Utagawa Kuniyoshi, Monk Nichiren in Exile on Sado Island, Art Institute of Chicago

Short history of ukiyo-e

In the 17th century, Japanese woodblock print grew more popular in the chōnin class (merchants, craftsmen and workers) who had become wealthy enough to afford to decorate their home. The earliest ukiyo-e artists started in the world of Japanese painting, inspired from yamato-e style to outline forms which allowed inks to be dripped on a wet surface and spread out towards the outlines.

In response to the increasing demand for ukiyo-e works, the first ukiyo-e woodblock prints were produced by Hishikawa Moronobu (1618-1694). The success led the artist to begin signing his work. He produced illustrations, not just for books, but as single-sheet images, which could stand alone or be used as part of a series.

Hishikawa Moronobu, Traveling party, Rijskmuseum

At first, the prints were monochromatic and colours were gradually introduced but used only for special commissions in the beginning. Using colours became standard with the success of Suzuki Harunobu’s (1724-1770) brocade prints in the 1760s. Adding colours to prints means carving a different shape on wood for each colour and then various version of the same print can exist with variation of colour. Usually, woodblocks for printing were not carved by artists, the production was divided between four actors:

• the artist, who designed the prints;
• the carver, who cut the woodblocks;
• the printer, who inked and pressed the woodblocks onto handmade paper;
• the publisher, who financed, promoted, and distributed the works.

Suzuki Harunobu, Young Lady with lantern, Rijskmuseum

Between the 18th century and the 19th century, numerous masters of ukiyo-e created portraits, landscapes. For example, some of the most well-known works of this Japanese art are the series of woodblock prints The Great Wave off Kanagawa by Katsushika Hokusai (1760-1849) and The Fifty-three Stations of the Tōkaidō by Utagawa Hiroshige (1797-1858). These two masters are central in the perception of Japanese art by the West and the trend of Japonisme became prominent and had an influence on early French Impressionists such as Edgar Degas, Édouard Manet and Claude Monet, as well as influencing Post-Impressionists such as Vincent van Gogh and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec.

Katsushika Hokusai, The Great Wave off Kanagawa, Rijskmuseum

Utagawa Hiroshige, The Great Bridge at Sanjō, from the series Fifty-Three Stations of the Tōkaidō, The Metropolitan Museum of Art

After the deaths of these two masters and due to the technological and social modernization that followed the Meiji Restoration of 1868, this art declined. But, in the 20th century, the shin-hanga (“new prints”) and sōsaku-hanga (“creative prints”) revived Japanese printmaking. One of the most famous artist of this time is Kawase Hasui (1883-1957).

Sometimes the same name comes back between two Japanese artists. This is often a master and its apprentice that reused the name with “II” after. This is the case for Utagawa Hiroshige (1797-1858) and Utagawa Hiroshige II (1826-1869).

Specific terms of this art

Ukiyo-e is the generic name of woodblock prints but there are other Japanese terms to describe in a more specific ways artworks according to the subject, the orientation and the size of the work. These three categories can be attributed to ukiyo-e. When ukiyo-e prints are assembled in a book of illustrations, such as the volume Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji, by Hokusai, the book is called e-hon.

Firstly, there is a non-exhaustive list of name according to the subject represented on the print:

• Bijin-ga, represents attractive female characters;
• Yakusha-e, translates in “actor prints”, it is about kabuki actors;
• Kachō-e, translates in “flower and bird pictures”, it represents nature prints and landscapes, Ohara Koson, also written Shoson or Hoson, is the master of kachō-e woodblock print with a large number of prints on birds, nature and other animals;

Ohara Koson, Great Egret in a storm, kachō-e, Rijksmuseum

• Fūkei-ga, represents landscape paintings where nature is as a state of mind;
• Yokohama-e, foreign characters and scenes in the port of Yokahama, the name comes from the name of the city that was the primary foreign settlement after 1859;
• Surimono, prints that include a five-line kyōka poem in the design;

Utagawa Kunisada, Crab walks along the water, surimono, Rijksmuseum

• Uchiwa-e, printed hand fans.

In terms of orientation, there are only two possibilities: tate-e (“portrait” orientation) and yoko-e (“landscape” orientation). The more frequent one is tate-e except in the specific format of ōban fūkei-ga by Hokusai and by Hiroshige which used most of the time yoko-e orientation.

Isoda Koryusai, Dragon and tiger, tate-e, Art Institute of Chicago

Utagawa Hiroshige II, A journey along the Sumida River, yoko-e, The Metropolitan Museum of Art

The format of ukiyo-e depends on the paper they were printed on. The more used ones are the ōban (around 37 × 25 cm) and the chūban (around 25 × 19 cm). The different formats have variable dimensions according to the sources, so it can change about centimetres this is why this part will contain approximations. It may also not be an exhaustive list:

• Ōban, mesures around 37 to 38 × 25,5 cm;
• Ō-ōban, means “big ōban“ and is larger than the classic with around 58 × 32 cm;
• Chūban, around 25 to 26 × 17 to 19 cm;
• Chūtanzaku, approximately 36 × 13 cm;
• Yatsugiri, a rare format that is half a chūban, and measures around 19 × 13 cm;
• Aiban, about 34 × 23 cm, quite rare size between ōban and chūban;
• Koban, corresponds to half an aiban, is roughly 23 × 17 cm;
• Hosoban, a rare and narrow format around 33 × 14,5 to 22 cm, commonly used in older woodblock prints of actors in the 18th century and used for kacho-ga prints in the 19th century;
• Hashira-e, long and really narrow print to be hung on the pillars of a house, measures around 70 × 12 cm;
• Kakemono-e, scrolls hung vertically on a wall, long and rather narrow, often consists of two ōban-sized prints one above the other to form a diptych;
• Mameban, measures around 12 × 8 cm, sometimes nicknamed “toy printing”;
• Ōtansaku, about 37 × 17 cm;
• Shikishiban, around 21 × 18 cm, ofter used for surimono prints;
• Nagaban, approximately 20 × 50 cm.

Myanmar

The sound of temple bells, the scent of incense filling temple halls, and the sight of people meditating may be among the first images that come to mind when we think of Buddhist culture. Across Asia, where Buddhism has had a profound cultural influence, these scenes represent more than a mere expression of religious devotion. They are part of cultural identities shaped by generations of art, architecture, and tradition. Yet, behind these graceful symbols lies a question worth exploring: when we preserve cultural heritage, are we also preserving the values that give it meaning?

When Religion Becomes Culture

In many communities, religion extends far beyond the walls of a place of worship. It influences community relationships, artistic expression, and everyday routines. Across parts of Asia, Buddhist temples and pagodas are not only sacred places but also important features of the cultural landscape, connecting contemporary communities across generations.

The temples and pagodas scattered across a vast landscape of Asia, reflecting a history in which Buddhist beliefs helped shape artistic expression and collective life. For visitors, these monuments may inspire wonder at the beauty of the yesteryear. For local communities, they may hold spiritual, historical, and cultural significance. Yet their importance raises a deeper question: if buildings can survive for centuries, how do we ensure that the meanings behind them continue to matter?

Thailand

Beyond Physical Preservation

Cultural heritage is often associated with protecting historic buildings and conserving artworks. Whilst those efforts remain essential, heritage emcompasses more than what can be seen and touched. It also includes the beliefs, traditions, and values that have been passed from one generation to another.

Buddhist practices such as giving alms to monks, traditional festivals rooted in religion, and deep filial piety toward elders illustrate how cultural values integrate into everyday life. These practices may embody generosity, humility, and devotion. Through repeated rituals, values takes visible form and are shared within a community.

However, participating in a cultural tradition and embodying its values are not necessarily the same thing. Visiting a pagoda may express a desire for serenity, but what about our thoughts and behaviour beyond its doors? Offering generosity in a religious setting is meaningful, but do we extend that kindness to others in our daily lives?

These questions do not diminish the importance of rituals or traditions. Rather, they remind us that cultural heritage is continually interpreted through human actions. Preserving a temple can protect an important part of history, but the ethical values associated with it depend on how people interpret them. Stone and brick can preserve a monument for centuries, but compassion must be renewed through everyday choices.

Japan

The Challenge of Keeping Heritage Alive

Preseving heritage means understanding its significance, respecting the related communities, and considering how its meanings can be shared to future generations, alongside protecting historic objects from physical deterioration.

This raises an important question: should cultural heritage remain a symbol of the past, or should it continue to influence how we live in the present?

Cultural heritage is not static. Traditions can be maintained while their meanings evolve in response to changing social realities. Religious buildings can be conserved, traditional crafts can be taught, and rituals can continue to be practised. At the same time, communities can reflect on the values these traditions express and the relevancy of them in contemporary life.

This is particularly important because cultural heritage does not always tell a simple story of harmony. Religious and cultural identities can bring communities together, but they can also become entangled with social divisions, and political conflict. Although Buddhism is often associated with peace and serenity, Myanmar’s history reminds us that a rich religious heritage does not automatically guarantee a peaceful society. Even in a country known for thousands of ancient pagodas and the UNESCO World Heritage Site of Bagan, religious and cultural identity can exist alongside complex political and social realities. Recognising this complexity does not diminish the significance of Buddhist art or tradition. Instead, it encourages a more honest understanding of how culture is inherited, interpreted, and lived.

Bhutan

What Do We Choose to Preserve?

The preservation of cultural heritage lives not only in the longevity of monuments, but in how faithfully we embody its values in our daily lives. The sacred sites of Asia preserve traces of artistic achievement and spiritual devotion. Their continued significance depends not only on their physical condition but also on the stories narrated about them and the ways communities continue to engage with them.

Ultimately, preserving cultural heritage means caring for both its physical forms and its continuing significance. We can restore ancient walls, protect murals, and safeguard traditional practices, but we must also remain curious about the meanings they carry. What values do these traditions express? Whose stories do they preserve? And how can they remain meaningful to future generations?

The most valuable heritage may not simply be what we inherit, but what we choose to understand, share, and carry forward. Perhaps the deeper purpose of cultural preservation is not simply to recreate the past, but to maintain a meaningful relationship between the past and the present.

Written by Ei Pyae Phyo Kyaw

Try to picture a sculpture. You are probably imagining bronze, marble or steel — something solid, permanent, made to outlast the hand that shaped it. Now imagine a sculpture that dissolves while you are still looking at it. That is the paradox at the heart of the work of Fujiko Nakaya, the Japanese artist who has been sculpting fog since 1970. Her fog sculptures have no fixed shape, no stable outline and no permanent place in the catalogue of art history. Nobody has ever seen the same Nakaya work twice, because wind, humidity and temperature rewrite it in real time. She is, in other words, the perfect counter-example to everything we think a sculpture should be.

Fujiko Nakaya’s fog sculpture Cloud #07156 filling the Rotunda of the Bourse de Commerce – Pinault Collection, Paris.

A Father Who Studied Snow, a Daughter Who Sculpts Fog

Fujiko Nakaya was born in Sapporo, Hokkaido, in 1933. Her father, Ukichiro Nakaya, was a physicist who became the first person in the world to create artificial snow crystals — a scientist of snow who raised an artist of fog. After studying in the United States, she joined Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.), the collective that brought artists and engineers together. In 1970, at the Osaka World Expo, she designed a fog installation for the Pepsi Pavilion, and a new sculptural medium was born.

Over the past five decades, more than eighty fog installations have been realised across dozens of countries, from Showa Kinen Park in Tachikawa, Tokyo to the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao.In 2023 she received the Wolf Prize in Arts, one of the most prestigious international awards in contemporary art — a late but well-deserved coronation for an artist in her nineties who is still creating.

Foggy Forest, 1992, at Showa Kinen Park, Tachikawa, Tokyo. (Courtesy of Fujiko Nakaya, photo: Shigeo Ogawa)

She Does Not Design Fog. She Designs the Conditions of Fog

The real question is not how she makes fog, but what she is actually making. Traditional sculpture tames a material into a fixed form, and the work exists because it has been fixed. Nakaya reverses this logic: she never designs the shape of the fog. She designs the conditions under which fog can happen — the position of the nozzles, the pressure of the water, the way the vapour enters a space. Once the work is switched on, wind, humidity, temperature and the movement of visitors all continue to rewrite it. She sets a rule, not a result; she designs a behaviour, not an object.

This is the meaning of “negative sculpture”. Rather than shaping a form, she shapes a relationship — between material and environment, between the work and its audience, between order and impermanence. The fog is not a controlled material but a participant in the completion of the work. What she truly challenges is not the material itself, but our definition of what a work of art is. Why should a sculpture be fixed? Must the artist be the only person who decides what a work finally looks like? A great work often begins with a question worth redefining, not with a new technology — and Nakaya has spent a lifetime proving it.

A Date with a Cloud: Cloud #07156 at the Bourse de Commerce

On 20 August 2026, I walked into the Bourse de Commerce – Pinault Collection in Paris, the former stock exchange transformed into a museum, to meet the fog in person. Cloud #07156, a new work created for the exhibition Clair-obscur, was occupying the heart of the building: the central Rotunda.

The moment I entered the Rotunda, dense white fog rushed towards me. One second I could still read the lines of Tadao Ando’s fair-faced concrete; the next, the world had been wiped to a blank white. Light falling from the dome was cut into countless shards by the vapour, floating and bending in the air. Your eyes lose focus: silhouettes three steps away dissolve, and all you can hear is the sound of footsteps and the soft hiss of rising mist. An orderly museum becomes a space in which to get lost — and, strangely, a space in which to take risks. When the fog finally lifts, everyone returns from their loss of focus, and strangers exchange glances as if they had just shared a small adventure.

From the second-floor walkway, however, the experience inverts. Visitors watch the whole scene from above, like gods contemplating a landscape that never stops shifting. On the ground floor you are immersed; on the upper level you observe. The same work is experienced as two entirely different times.

From the second-floor walkway: Cloud #07156 seen from above, where visitors on the ground floor are swallowed by the fog — the same work, experienced as two entirely different times.

Three Hundred Years of Architecture in One Rotunda

That tension is rooted in the building itself. The foundations of the Rotunda go back to the 16th century, when the palace of Catherine de Medici stood on this site; a single surviving column still rises inside the building. Between 1763 and 1767, the architect Nicolas Le Camus de Mézières built a circular grain exchange, the Halle aux blés, to store wheat for the city of Paris. In the early 19th century, after a series of fires, the architect François-Joseph Bélanger rebuilt the dome in 1813 with a ground-breaking cast-iron structure — the first long-span cast-iron frame ever erected. Then, between 1885 and 1889, the architect Henri Blondel transformed the building into the Bourse de Commerce, glazing the dome and painting a circular frieze around the hall celebrating global trade. In 1889, the year of the Universal Exhibition, it opened as the Paris stock exchange.

In 2021, Tadao Ando inserted a fair-faced concrete cylinder, about thirty metres in diameter and nine metres high, into the old circular hall — a perfect geometric plug that divides the building in two: the ceremonial Rotunda inside the cylinder, and a continuous ring corridor between the cylinder and the historic walls. Straight lines, right angles, exact geometry: Ando’s concrete is a pure confession of certainty.

A Conversation Between Certainty and Impermanence

And so the exhibition becomes a carefully staged dialogue. On the ground floor, Nakaya dissolves Ando’s certainty with ultimate impermanence: the concrete edges are softened into contours that drift and breathe. On the upper level, Ando’s corridor becomes a rational grandstand that frames Nakaya’s impermanence into a flowing picture. Hard and soft, permanence and change, construction and evaporation — the two artists complete each other.

Looking back over her career, from Fog Sculpture #08025 (F.O.G.) outside the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao in 1998 to Cloud #07156 in Paris, Nakaya has always used the lightest, most perishable medium to ask questions about nature and humanity, the ephemeral and the eternal. Her works cannot be stored in a warehouse; they cannot be preserved. And yet they are remembered far more vividly than many fixed sculptures, because every visitor becomes part of a work that is never finished. She reminds us that sculpture does not have to be permanent, just as beauty does not have to be solid. Some things stay with us precisely because they cannot be grasped.

Glacier Falls – Greenland, 2017–18, at the Forum of Maison Hermès, Ginza, Tokyo. (Courtesy of Fujiko Nakaya, video still: Noriko Koshida)

Article written by Yunan Jiang

From beauty to emotion: how art has changed its face

Art history is often seen as a succession of aesthetic movements. However, if we examine this evolution of art from a sociological and economic perspective, we realise that it represents a genuine transformation of its very function within society. Once the benchmark of beauty and an instrument of sublimation, art has gradually broken free from classical representation to explore the realms of the sensory, the conceptual and the intimate.

From the cult of beauty to institutional commissions

For centuries, the value of a work of art was measured by its ability to achieve the ideal of beauty. Whether in Greek sculpture or the great Renaissance altarpieces, the primary aim was to uplift the viewer’s soul through magnificence, technical mastery and the harmony of forms.

Within the political economy of culture, this period corresponded to a commissioned art, shaped by those in power (the Church, the monarchy, and later the rising bourgeoisie). The artist was then a highly skilled craftsman whose work met precise criteria of social and aesthetic validation. The viewer was, above all, a passive contemplator faced with a universally accepted ideal.

The turning point of modernity: challenging the senses and the intellect

Over the centuries, and particularly with industrialisation and the emergence of modern societies, this paradigm has been shattered. The advent of photography freed painting from its mere function of mimetic representation. Artists no longer needed to faithfully reproduce reality; they chose to reinterpret it through the prism of the senses and the mind.

Thus, art shifted towards a radical subjectivity:

•    The expression of the invisible: Works such as Edvard Munch’s *The Scream* no longer sought to be ‘beautiful’; instead, they gave tangible form to auditory and psychological anguish, appealing to the viewer’s sense of hearing and sensory empathy.

•    The intellect and the concept: With the avant-garde movements of the 20th century, the art object became a vehicle for ideas, inviting the public to reflect on the world rather than simply admire technical skill.

To explore this transition in audiences and forms of cultural mediation in greater depth, you can read our article on the challenges facing contemporary cultural mediation.

What impact does this have on today’s viewer?

Today, this shift from an art of ‘visual sublimation’ to an art of ‘sensory and intellectual experience’ is profoundly transforming our relationship with artworks. Museum visitors are no longer there merely to contemplate the frozen beauty of a masterpiece, but to undergo a subjective, and at times disorienting, experience that resonates with their own perceptions.

This shift poses new challenges for cultural institutions and players in the art market, who are torn between the need to democratise access to artworks and the need to maintain a critical stance in the face of art that has become highly conceptual.