Zimmerli: Japanese Prints

Okay so here I am reviewing an exhibition that I saw over at the Zimmerli last week. Honestly speaking, I wasn't expecting much from the Zimmerli museum, due to the fact that it's a university attraction. I sorta have this bad bias towards such museums, thinking that they only exist for the sake of the univeristy's public recognition. Shallow yes, and it's something that I'm still trying to get over. However I was glad to see something that struck my misconceptions upside the head.

Wood block prints. Japanese related ones at that. Though they may not have been made by the hands of their cultural kinsmen, these prints showed remarkable craftsmanship resembling the likeness of the prints of old. One of the things I love about Japanese prints, is the color that is being used in a composition. How the colors are not vibrant but earthly, uniform in "temperature" and not fighting for attention. Such as the image up top, notice how the majority of the composition is supported by the variety of brown colors. This is one of the things that I admire about Japanese block prints, because it makes the atmosphere around the work seem "real". When I mean real I'm referring to the pressence of a more mundane surrounding; our world after all is not just a world of sunshine and bright colors, it is also gray and cold.