Featured on PDR in the collection Images from Japanese Design Magazine Shin-Bijutsukai (1902)

Shin-Bijutsukai (New Oceans of Art) magazine appeared during a watershed in Japanese publishing history: when pattern and design books became standalone works of art. The first Japanese pattern books — colorless woodblock manuals, known as hinagata-bon (雛形本) — were created in the 1660s, when political stability and a bullish economy fostered an expansion in fashion and a desire for voguish textiles. While growing out of this genre, the colorful and abstract designs in Shin-Bijutsukai magazine (1902–1906) reflect a convergence of historical and technological shifts in turn-of-the-century Japanese society. Notably, artists traveling abroad on government grants encountered Art Nouveau and Japonisme — the Western European fondness for a mediated, Japanese aesthetic — which they, in turn, folded back into domestic patterns: forging originality through the prism…