An exhibition of Japanese wood block prints was put on display here Friday at COMSATS Institute of Information Technology by Dr Shahida Mansoor, featuring exquisite skills of the artist in the craft of block printing.
Japanese Ambassador Hiroshi Oe inaugurated the show, in which the artist presented her skills by using traditional Japanese techniques and materials of water-based Japanese wood block print making. Shahida Mansoor is popular for surprising the viewer with her innovative and modern approach in art work. She was granted Monbusho Scholarship and she is the first recipient of the doctoral degree in the field of Japanese wood block print making, from the Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music. Her work was acknowledged and appreciated in Europe. Her thesis is about juxtaposition of tradition of Art in Pakistan, with the aesthetics of the Japanese Art in her own work. According to the artiste, the Japanese wood block print is the medium, which helped me to understand the spirit of oriental art. My earliest art education was in European academic manner. I considered changing my medium to the Japanese water-based Woodblock print making in the new environment of a different cultural context.
“As I discovered many similarities between the opposite mediums of miniature painting and Japanese Woodblock prints in contrast to the traditional characteristics of Western art, my encounter with the Japanese Woodblock print proved to be a sufficient support. This discovery of the similarities between Muslim Miniature art and Japanese Woodblock print is based on the exploration of comparative approach towards these art forms,” she said. The artists of both the traditions work on handmade paper and use water-based colours. Both the miniature painting and Japanese Woodblock prints were done on small size basically to be viewed in albums. The artists from both these traditions use flat colours without shading and in past, mostly they used bird eye view perspective instead of single point perspective. The practice of drawing from memory or imagination instead of real models existed in both the cultures. She said that nature was depicted in a symbolic, romantic and imaginative way in terms of colour, perspective and composition. The artists of both the art forms use plain background, with nothing depicted on it, for emphasizing the major characters. Both the arts were highly decorative. Instead of creating an illusion of depth in painting, the artists of both these traditions were more interested in a certain ambiguity in patterns and form which trembles on the edge between abstraction and representation.
