Ukiyo-e were never meant for museum walls
Two hundred years ago, ordinary people in Edo bought them for a few coins and pinned them up at home.
UkiyoeLabJapan is a small studio in Japan bringing these prints back into everyday rooms. We also run Ukiyoe Lab, an Instagram and YouTube project about daily life in Edo-period Japan, and every story we share is checked against historical sources.
Our shop has two lines:
Museum Collection – Reproductions of ukiyo-e from public-domain museum and library archives (Art Institute of Chicago, The Met, Cleveland Museum of Art, Rijksmuseum, Library of Congress and others). Most are original 18th- and 19th-century impressions; the few made from 20th-century woodblock reprints are labeled as such in the listing. We use the institutions' own high-resolution scans without AI upscaling, and keep the paper's age and marks as they are.
Imayo Ukiyo-e – Our original artworks placing ukiyo-e motifs in modern Japan: a cat puzzled at a ticket gate, another stretching for a strap on a crowded train. These are created with AI-assisted tools, then selected and edited by us. They are not reproductions of historical prints.
Every poster is printed to order by our production partner, Gelato, usually close to where you live.