In the hills of East Tennessee, art vastly different from the familiar was on display in the Ewing Gallery.
    
Hideki Kimura, contemporary printmaker and professor of printmaking at Kyoto City University of the Arts, gave an insightful lecture into the world of Japanese printmaking.
    
Kimura began his speech by giving some background on his past work. A fiercely proud native of Kyoto, Japan, he had his first exhibition in Tokyo at the age of 24.
    
His artwork is most recognized for the use of duality, with an element serving two functions, the latter of which is not always immediately apparent. In 1988 he formed the group Maxi Graphica, along with six other artists, all of whom used postmodern techniques in their printmaking.
    
Kimura also explained the history behind the separate styles of printmaking. After World War II, the Japanese art world experienced a monumental shift of values. The rise of the Sosakaku Undo movement emerged from the midst of this cultural turmoil, with the traditional Ukiyo-e method standing in firm opposition to change. The controversy arose because of the invention and implementation of photographic technology, while the traditional printers felt the art should continue to be done by hand.
    
During the Golden Period of Sosaku Undo, the strain between the rival art forms caused a schism in the movement, spawning the modern and postmodern printing schools.  The postmodern printmaking movement celebrated the delicate interaction of techniques, photography, tradition and surface.
    
“Even though the postmodern movement split from the Ukiyo-e printmaking, it still makes its home in art today,” Kimura said.
    
The youngest artist on display, Shoji Miyamoto, 23, uses woodcut prints in his work, many of which feature the delicious Japanese snack, sushi. Obsessive repetition is a staple in the art of Kouseki Ono. What appears from a distance to be a geometrically designed rug, is actually thousands of protruding, multicolored cylinders.
    
The vivid hues recall the pop art movement.
    
“(They) had an indirect influence on printmaking as a fine art form,” Kimura said, adding that they eventually helped pave the way for photography as a new facet of modern printmaking.
    
During the question-and-answer session, Kimura spoke in his native Japanese while a translator mediated questions from the audience. He explained the relationship of “surface” in the printmaking world as the ideal being to have a visible surface in the work, but not obtrusive to the point where the focus of the art and its message was obscured.
    
He also expounded on the bureaucracy behind the art world. While artists in America were almost always dependent on patronage and had external sources of wealth, in Japan, artists could make a name for themselves free from financial constraints. After the questions fizzled out, the guests dispersed out into the Ewing Gallery to ponder the personal implications of the displays.
    
“The interplay between light and shadow reflects the cultural turmoil in post-World War Japan,” Julia Bell, senior in mathematics, said. “You can see the same theme of conflict in many of the other prints as well.”