What Was the Floating World in Japanese Art

What Was the Floating World in Japanese Art

Date: 24 February 2026 (Tuesday)
Time: 6:15pm-7:30pm
Venue: MWT3, G/F, Meng Wah Complex, Main Campus, The University of Hong Kong
Registration: CLICK HERE (required)

The Tokugawa shogunate (1603-1868) was established to bring peace after almost a century of civil war. Discipline and order were paramount objectives. Yet the shogunate was fully aware that places of escape and alterity were needed, that is, locations of urban delight. These came to be known as the Floating World (ukiyoe). They were sites of a wealth of popular cultural and artistic forms.

Guest speaker: Prof. Timon Screech  (Chair, International Research Centre for Japanese Studies, Kyoto)

Timon Screech taught the history of Japanese art at SOAS, University of London, for 30 years, before moving to a chair at the International Research Center for Japanese Studies (Nichibunken) in Kyoto, in 2021. He has also been guest professor at numerous institutions in the EU, Japan and USA.
Screech is the author of some dozen books and many articles on the visual culture of the Japan’s early-modern Edo period. His PhD was published as The Lens Within the Heart and remains in print in a second, paperback edition. Perhaps best-known is his Sex and the Floating World: Erotic Images in Japan, 1700-1820, which is also available in Chinese, Japanese and Polish translations. His field-defining study, Obtaining Images: Art, Production and Display in Edo Japan was published in 2012.
In 2020 he published two further books, The Shogun’s Silver Telescope: God, Art and Money in the English Quest for Japan and Tokyo Before Tokyo: Power and Magic in the Shogun’s City of Edo (also available in Chinese). He has just completed a major monograph which will appear in 2026, Shogun Avatar: The Worship of Tokugawa in Early-Modern Japan, and concurrently a book on early European contacts with the Kingdom of Lūchū (J: Ryūkyū), modern Okinawa. He is now at work on the history of the Rokuhara district in Kyoto.
Screech is a Freeman of the City of London, a Fellow of the British Academy and of the Royal Society of Art. In 2022 he was awarded both the Yamagata Bantō Prize, and the Fukuoka Culture Prize, and in 2024 received the Japanese Foreign Minister’s Commendation.

This is a public event co-organized by Academy of Visual Arts, School of Creative Arts, Hong Kong Baptist University through Hong Kong Baptist University, Research Committee, International Activities Programme 2025/26, in collaboration with The International Research Center for Japanese Studies (Nichibunken).

Register for other lectures of the same series: