Image: Ōta Memorial Museum of Art, Tokyo
The Ōta Memorial Museum of Art in Tokyo will present ‘Katsushika Oi “Yoshiwara Kagizen-no-zu”: Genealogy of Night Views’, an exhibition focused on Katsushika Oi’s celebrated depiction of nighttime Yoshiwara, beginning 6 October 2026. The presentation will also trace the development of night-view imagery across Japanese art from the Edo period through the Meiji and Taishō periods.
According to the museum’s announcement, the exhibition will include approximately 120 works depicting night scenes. Artists represented will include Utagawa Hiroshige and Kobayashi Kiyochika, alongside other artists working across the three historical periods. The announcement presents Oi’s ‘Yoshiwara Kagizen-no-zu’ as the central work within this broader survey of nocturnal imagery.
‘Yoshiwara Kagizen-no-zu’ will remain on view for the entire exhibition period. The other works will be changed between the first and second parts of the exhibition, allowing the museum to rotate the presentation of the wider group of approximately 120 night-view works.
The museum’s notice identifies the venue as its Harajuku museum in Tokyo. It gives the opening date as 6 October 2026 but does not specify a closing date. No further details about the exhibition’s curatorial structure, individual loans or accompanying programmes were included in the announcement.
The exhibition’s title places Oi’s work within a historical sequence of Japanese night scenes, connecting an Edo-period image of Yoshiwara with later examples from the Meiji and Taishō eras. The museum has announced the event as a presentation extending beyond Oi’s work alone, with Hiroshige, Kiyochika and other artists contributing to its account of changing approaches to nocturnal subjects.
