PASADENA, CA.- USC Pacific Asia Museum announced the museum's new exhibition, Tsuruya Kōkei: Modern Kabuki Prints Revised & Revisited, celebrating the 30th anniversary of this contemporary artist's first solo show-held at PAM in spring 1989-Kokei is widely celebrated as one of Japan's leading contemporary print artists. Organized by guest curator, Dr. Kendall Brown, Professor of Asian Art History in the School of Art at California State University Long Beach.

"Kokei's work is relevant in at least two ways. First, it brilliantly shows how creative artists can innovate within even the richest traditions." Said guest curator, Dr. Kendall Brown, "Second, his portraits of Kabuki actors and his own face suggest how identity is also constructed through shifting negotiation between the self we present and that seen by others."

USC Pacific Asia Museum Interim Director, Selma Holo said, "Tsuruya Kōkei is the leading contemporary print maker in Japan, and USC Pacific Asia Museum had the foresight of presenting his prints thirty years ago, when he was lesser known outside of Japan. Flash forward thirty years later, and we are revisiting that ground breaking exhibition to showcase this now established artist that honors the past while making kabuki prints contemporary."

Known for his bold, even disturbing, portraits of Japan's leading actors in a dynamic theatrical form, Tsuruya Kōkei responds to the idiosyncratic late-18th century kabuki prints by the great Sharaku. A master in his own right, Kōkei captures the intense color, movement and emotion of kabuki. Yet diverges from tradition by designing, carving and printing his own work. Using extremely delicate paper, his works juxtapose emotionally dynamic images with fragile materials to create objects of extraordinary power.

The exhibition presents an unprecedented complete collection of all of Kōkei's actor prints from 1984-1993. To explore the broader contours of Kabuki actor prints, Kōkei's work is on view along with actor prints by Sharaku as well as two-dozen by contemporary Japanese and western artists.

The exhibition utilizes the complex issues of identity in Kabuki-where actors take on multiple roles and males take on female roles-to explore broader questions of self-definition and its representation. It includes several of Kōkei's emotionally torqued self-portraits produced after he gave up actor prints in 2000. It concludes by examining how kabuki actor imagery has inspired pop images over the last 20 years, demonstrating the productive link between Japan's historic ukiyo (floating world) and our own culture.

Tsuruya Kōkei (b. 1946, real name Mitsui Gen) burst onto the Japanese art world in 1978 with self-carved and self-printed portraits of Kabuki actors. Although the grandson of the noted painter Nakazawa Hiromitsu, the self-taught Kōkei produced about a dozen actor portraits every year from 1978 to 2000, observing actors at Tokyo's Kabukiza Theater and then selling his prints there or by subscription. The British Museum writes that Kōkei's "perceptive, slightly grotesque studies of contemporary actors have made him the most notable artist of Kabuki prints" after World War II. His first foreign solo exhibition was at PAM in 1989. From 2000 he turned almost exclusively to self-portraits, but returned to printmaking in 2017.