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Wikipedia:Peer review/Ukiyo-e/archive2

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Previous peer review

This peer review discussion has been closed.

I intend to make this my next Featured Article nomination, and would greatly appreciate feedback to make sure the article is of the highest quality.

Thanks, Curly Turkey ⚞¡gobble!01:39, 19 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Crisco comments
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  • Ah, a 40k article on a subject I know nothing about! Well, I guess I'll learn something. I will focus mostly on grammar and what is difficult to understand for me, a lay reader. — Crisco 1492 (talk) 09:44, 20 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]
    Thanks for taking the time! Curly Turkey ⚞¡gobble!01:52, 21 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]
    • "ukiyo-e" - what's with the quotes?
    • "brocade prints" led to colour as a standard, - why use the English translation and not the original Japanese? Also, is "led to colour as a standard" logically sound here? I'm thinking it led to the use of colour becoming standard.
    • The Great Wave off Kanagawa - I'm very surprised this is not in the lede as an image
      • I've been mulling redoing the lead images, but I'm reluctant to include The Wave:
        1. It's the one image I can think of that made a splash (har har) all on its own; other artists became known gradually for their bodies of work, rather than for a particular "hit" image that had an immediate impact. For that reason, I think it's appropriate to have that "hit" image in the chronology where it's specifically referred to, so readers don't have to scroll back to see it when they read about it (very few individual images are actually named in the body).
        2. It's atypical of ukiyo-e in general, and even of ukiyo-e of Hokusai's generation. Hokusai influenced an awful lot of artists to take up doing lanscapes, but they tended to do it in a style more like Hiroshige's than Hokusai's highly abstract and individualistic style. As the article is about the genre of ukiyo-e, I think the lead images should represent general trends, and avoid something so atypical.
        3. The Wave (and Red Fuji) tend to dominate attention, drawing attention away from what's around them. The article is about a 200-year period in art, not "HOKUSAI ... and all those other guys" which seems almost inevitably the impression people get of ukiyo-e. Hokusai still gets plenty of attention—he gets foreshadowed, then an entire paragraph to himself, scattered mentions throughout, and then gets three out of 55 images (or 5½%) out of the thousands upon thousands of readily available images by hundreds of artists.
      • Curly Turkey ⚞¡gobble!01:52, 21 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]
    • Considering you discuss erotica as a genre a little, I'm surprised we aren't using something like The Dream of the Fisherman's Wife to represent said genre. The only nude here is considerably more tasteful than the later erotica.
    • Why the perfect tense in the Pre-history section? What does "had" add?
    • Why the focus on wood block books in Pre-history?
    • the new capital of Edo and following... would this work better after you explain the context?
    • shikomi-e - the type you are using here looks considerably different than the rest of the article
    • Moronobu was ... Moronobu was - ick
    • The paintings of Miyagawa Chōshun (1683–1752) portrayed early 18th-century life in delicate colours. Chōshun made no prints. - why not combine the two sentences, or rework this so that we don't have a really short sentence?
    • Would be nice if you standardised whether or not you italicize genre names.
    • Consider linking New Year to Japanese New Year, or at least make it clear that you're referring to the lunar new year.
    • Consider linking fine to Fine paper?
    • amongst - Wikipedia is very much against "amongst", as it is considered old-fashioned.
      • I have no idea why Wikipedia would think that. I ran into this a while ago, and started asking around. Plenty of people continue to use "amongst" daily (including many Americans), and so far few of those I've brought it up with realized it was even a "thing". Canadian news sources continue to use it, even in titles for "high-falutin'" articles on ice hockey. I strongly suspect the prejudice against "amongst" is limited to writers who have been taught to hold a prejudice against it, totally out of step with the living language. (trivia: the "old-fashioned" amongst is actually newer to the language than among). Curly Turkey ⚞¡gobble!01:52, 21 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]
    • Eishōsai Chōki - I understand if we don't know his life span, but at least use (fl. 1786–1808)
    • though ukiyo-e had a long history preceding these late-era masters. - we've just read through that history; is this sentence really necessary?
    • the latter an area rarely explored in the dictatorial atmosphere of the Edo era, a sign of the weakening of the Shogunate in mid-century. - could be read as the dictatorial nature was a sign of weakening
  • Will be back tomorrow. — Crisco 1492 (talk) 09:44, 20 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]
Prosperosity comments
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  • Do you think Takashina Shūji (高階秀爾)'s 日本美術を見る眼 東と西の出会い (1991) should be mentioned? I read an excerpt from Suwa Haruo's book on perspective (lemme see that it's called...諏訪春雄 - 日本人と遠近法 ちくま新書, 1998), and Suwa pointed out that even though Takashina's book was in 1991, it was the first to ever link the lack of perspective with a distinctiveness in Japanese art. Suwa also talked about interactions with the west's ideas of perspective showing up a lot in ukiyo-e, pointing out Suzuki Harunobu's お仙と団扇売り, since you can see the torii in the background getting smaller with distance, but the woman is still contorted as if the frame of reference was taken from multiple angles. I see perspective gets mentioned a couple times in passing, but one of the times ("...was generally thought inferior to Western works which emphasized mastery of naturalistic perspective and anatomy.") implies that perspective and anatomy in ukiyo-e is significantly different to Western art, but the article doesn't really explain why. The book also talks a lot about the stance of bijin (how they're 蛇体姿勢 and not straight up and down, even when they're up and down they're looking behind, etc). Even though these were aspects of Japanese art in general, greater emphasis might be needed on perspective/anatomy, especially since it was apparently these that influenced a lot of Western artists. --Prosperosity (talk) 06:27, 3 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]
    • Both books are in local libraries, so I'll check them out tomorrow. Question: when you say "should be mentioned", do you mean cited, or mentioned with someone like Suwa as a citation? Curly Turkey ⚞¡gobble!07:21, 3 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]
      • I assume this is the Harunobu you're talking about. I'm having trouble coming up with stuff online that says anything about 蛇体姿勢—everything I'm coming across talks about 怪談話 about women literally turning into snakes. I'm sure there's some other vocabulry that refers to this kind of thing, but I'm not familiar with it. Any other sources you could point out would be helpful. Curly Turkey ⚞¡gobble!09:00, 3 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]
That's the one that was in there! You can see how osen's head and legs are painfully contorted, if you actually give sitting like that a go. I meant Takashina being mentioned in the text, since apparently he was the first one who linked Japanese perspective with the idea that it was a positive, genre-based thing and not just Japanese painters being less superior to Western ones, even though it was 150 years later. These are Suwa's opinions, not mine, so since you've got a chance to look you can evaluate his arguments yourself! I've had a quick search of 立美人図+姿勢 and nothing special was coming up. He'd listed the term as 「蛇体姿勢」 when writing, so apparently it's not his own, perhaps Takashina's. --Prosperosity (talk) 02:28, 4 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]
I haven't come across the term 「蛇体姿勢」 yet, but there are two whole chapters on perspective in ukiyo-e in the book. I'm going to see if I can boil the whole two chapters down to a paragraph. It's a bit disappointing the book has no index ... and it's a dinky little book with even dinkier little b&w reproductions of the artwork. Curly Turkey ⚞¡gobble!03:59, 5 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]
Try page 103! Ooh, I see, it was a term Wakakuwa Midori used (I'd somehow thought 104 was the first time it had come up). The artwork is really awful, you'd expect a book dealing with art to at least reproduce it nicely! --Prosperosity (talk) 08:52, 5 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]