Echoes of the Floating World
Tacoma Art Museum
February 22, 2024 - January 4, 2026
King 5 Evening Magazine
Tacoma Art Museum exhibit connects the past to the present
Author: Saint Bryan
Published: March 6, 2025
The exhibition features about 60 woodblock prints, popular and as affordable as a bowl of soup in their day, and seven contemporary artists.
"One of the cool things about this exhibition is it shows how these wood block prints from a couple of hundred years ago have continued to inspire art today," Stoll said.
We've met Seattle paper cutting artist Lauren Iida before. But we've never seen such a large-scale piece as the one she titled "Nightmare."
"It shows two people who are incarcerated in a prison camp for Japanese-Americans," she said. "You can see their suitcases and their tags with serial numbers that they were given as prisoners and then in the background you can see like a traditional mythological Japanese creature to represent the doom and danger of that time."
"One of the cool things about this exhibition is it shows how these wood block prints from a couple of hundred years ago have continued to inspire art today," Stoll said.
We've met Seattle paper cutting artist Lauren Iida before. But we've never seen such a large-scale piece as the one she titled "Nightmare."
"It shows two people who are incarcerated in a prison camp for Japanese-Americans," she said. "You can see their suitcases and their tags with serial numbers that they were given as prisoners and then in the background you can see like a traditional mythological Japanese creature to represent the doom and danger of that time."
|
Nightmare (2025)
Hand-cut paper, ink 14 x 12 ft Lauren Iida’s artworks are an ongoing investigation into her own Japanese American heritage and the lasting intergenerational trauma resulting from the unjust incarceration of her ancestors during World War II. Through her paper-cut art practice, Iida brings new life to historical photos, amplifies forgotten stories, and draws connections between the injustices of her past and those presently being faced in her local and global community. 
"Nightmare" (2025) detail
|
"Nightmare" installation at TAM
Reference photo courtesy of the National Archives and Records Administration via Densho
|