WHEN I TRAVEL to a city, I find art museums and their masterpieces: “Sunflowers” in Amsterdam, the “Prodigal Son” in St. Petersburg, “David” in Florence. Van Gogh, Rembrandt, Michelangelo. These are masters, according to some cultural imagination.
But it wasn’t until this past April that I encountered an Asian master and masterpiece: Katsushika Hokusai’s “Under the Wave Off Kanagawa.” The print is better known as “The Great Wave”—you know, the Apple wave emoji. Why is this the first Asian masterpiece that I’ve seen?
Moving to Chicago for college, my interest in culture—and becoming “cultured”—grew as I immersed myself in the city. I went to Art Institute of Chicago whenever I could, training myself in some basic art history. The museum gave me visual language for my personal life, a growing disdain for certainty through Magritte and racism through Motley’s “Nightlife” in the shadow of Hopper’s “Nighthawks.” Even with East Asian roots, I never spent much time in the East Asian galleries. Tucked to the right of the grand staircase leading to the always-crowded impressionism galleries, the Japanese print section sits sequestered below the European masters.
It’s here that three prints of Hokusai’s “Wave” have briefly emerged as part of the exhibition “The Connoisseurship of Japanese Prints.” The iconic wave arches over two canoes. Part of a series of views of Mt. Fuji, the image places the holy mountain in impotence next to the raging water.
The title cartouche is fractured, indicating that these iterations came well after the woodblocks dulled from the 5,000 first prints, prints originally sold in 1829 for the price of a bowl of soba. These were mass-produced prints, not a Japanese heritage such as calligraphy or painting. It was the West that called this wave a masterpiece.
Art historian Christine Guth reminds us that European obsession with “discovery” and the “Orient” led to an “enthusiasm for things exotic” in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The intelligibility of the wave’s color, a blue pigment from Germany, lent to the print’s European embrace. Even the ubiquity of the name “The Great Wave,” rather than the actual title, tells us that this print was first designated a masterpiece outside of Japan.
I fantasize about writing my own masterpiece for the literary canon, but Hokusai’s “Wave” urges me to see that canons are curated by power. Acclaim often speaks of a work’s popularity with the privileged. Masterpieces are complicated by whiteness.
It’s not a mistake that the privileged have made very few Asians—or Africans, or women, or queer people—into masters. But the answer is not to make more of us masters. We’ve had enough of those.
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