Mother and her Children in Front of a Freestanding Screen of a Chinese Lion 1786

Kitagawa Utamaro made this print of a mother and children with woodblocks and ink in the late 1700s. The materiality of this print is inseparable from its making: Utamaro, or his workshop assistants, would have painstakingly carved a series of woodblocks. Each block would have been inked in a different colour, then pressed onto paper in precise registration to build up the image. Consider the incredible labor involved: the felling of the trees, the preparation of the wood, the cutting of the blocks, the mixing of the inks, the printing itself. All of this done by hand. This collaborative mode of production was common in the ukiyo-e tradition, and speaks volumes about the social context of artmaking at the time. Next time you look at a print, remember that you are seeing the end result of a complex, labor-intensive process, one that challenges our assumptions about who makes art, and how it gets made.