The idea for the smart, complex and challenging exhibition ¡°From Ukiyo-e to Photography¡± at the Edo-Tokyo Museum started from the discovery of two images. One is a photograph of the Meiji-Era (1867-1912) Minister of Home Affairs Toshimichi Okubo, taken in Paris in 1878. The second is a color ukiyo-e print of Okubo, made in 1878 by the woodblock artist Kiyochika Kobayashi, which is clearly based on the earlier photographic portrait.

From this relatively straightforward use of a photograph as source material, a year of research and preparation has gone into organizing a remarkably varied presentation of creative innovation and genre-bending. There are photo-realistic woodblock prints and paintings and, conversely, photographs that have been colored to look like handmade art. You can also see ukiyo-e of Japanese beauties holding photographs, and rather eerie souvenir portraits that feature the head of a Caucasian client, copied from a photograph and grafted onto a pre-painted kimono with Mount Fuji in the background. Welcome to ¡°Ye Olde Photo Shoppe,¡± version 1880.

Of course these visual mash-ups are highly symbolic: The imported technology of industrialized Europe and the U.S., with its scientific gaze has, literally, been superimposed on, or inserted into, the pre-modern world of Japan and its aesthetic traditions. A satirical 1882 ukiyo-e print by Yoshifuji Utagawa, ¡°Enlightenment and the Destruction of the Old Ways Compared,¡± features in the exhibition as an indication of the times. Various anthropomorphized objects can be seen squaring off with each other; a rickshaw beats a palanquin with a stick and a kerosene lamp battles an old-fashioned ceramic oil lamp. In the corner, ukiyo-e can be seen fighting off photography. The insight of this exhibition, however, is that it reveals the liaison and continuity between the two.