Polar Bear and Cub in Ice by the Inuit artist Niviasi.

Inuit Prints: Japanese Inspiration
At the UBC Museum of Anthropology until September 25

Inuit Prints: Japanese Inspiration is exactly that, an overview of the influence of Japanese woodcut traditions on the early evolution of Inuit stonecuts, stencils, and lithographs. On view at the Museum of Anthropology, this is an attractive exhibition. It’s also a tad didactic, possessing the air of an art-history lecture for the young and uninformed.

Organized by the Canadian Museum of Civilization and drawn largely from its collections, the show comprises 49 works on paper, most of them dating from the years 1957 to 1962. Prints and drawings are complemented by a small selection of historic cutting and printing tools, and a video about the enduring relationship between traditional Japanese papermakers and Inuit artists.

In 1948, James Houston, an artist and federal-government worker, was sent to the North to expand the market for Inuit art, which then consisted primarily of stone and ivory carving and basketry. He envisioned printmaking as one of the means to this end, although initially the Inuit prints on paper that he oversaw were small in scale and often limited to gift cards. When the Canadian government decided to back a “high end” print studio in Cape Dorset, Houston travelled to Japan to study with a master woodblock printer, Un’ichi Hiratsuka.

Houston spent three months in Japan, from November 1958 to late January 1959, and some of the prints, watercolours, and ink-wash drawings he made there are on display in the show. Ranging from competent to clumsy and even trite, they are conspicuously overshadowed by the work of his students, the Inuit artists of what would become the internationally renowned Cape Dorset print studio. Included here are some of the most famous and accomplished prints to issue from that studio, such as The Enchanted Owl by Kenojuak Ashevak, Four Muskoxen by Osuitok Ipeelee, and My People by Parr. That these prints have become iconic markers of our national cultural heritage speaks to the immense creativity tapped by the program Houston initiated.

Houston brought back to Cape Dorset not only the Japanese woodcut techniques he had learned firsthand but also contemporary examples of the medium by his teacher Hiratsuka, Shik? Munakata, Kichiemon Okamura, and others. These prints are interspersed throughout the exhibition, demonstrating the impact of certain characteristics of the Japanese tradition on Inuit printmaking. For instance, the compositional use of negative space—the blank white of the paper—seen in Yoshitoshi Mori’s village scene Highway is reflected in the extraordinary blue-on-white design of Polar Bear and Cub in Ice, by the Inuit artist Niviasi.

The subtle gradations of colour characteristic of the Japanese stencil technique known as kappazuri find brilliant realization in Osuitok Ipeelee’s Owl, Fox and Hare Legend and, again and especially, in Ipeelee’s Four Muskoxen. The most dramatic innovations the Inuit artists made, however, were their expansion of scale, their intensity of vision, and their use of local stone rather than wood as their relief-printing medium, since wood was not a viable material in the Arctic. The stone definitely bestows its own character upon the prints.

Also on view in MOA’s Audain Gallery is Faces and Voices of the Inuit Art Market, an exhibition curated by 17 University of British Columbia students enrolled in a museum-practices course. Including examples of Inuit sculpture, prints, and drawings, and even a chess set, the show poses important questions about “authenticity” and “value” within the context of government-mandated, postcolonial, “fourth world” cultural production. It’s a worthy companion to Inuit Prints: Japanese Inspiration.