There are many artists who can be identified by a single image – van Gogh's sunflowers, Warhol's soup cans, Monet's water lilies – but only one has been immortalised in emoji form: Japanese woodblock artist Katsushika Hokusai.
His instantly recognisable wave print – known variously as The Great Wave, or The Wave, but actually titled The Great Wave off Kanagawa – was a hit when it was printed in 1831, and its appeal has only strengthened, transcending the years to become a graphic shorthand for Japan, appearing in beer commercials, tattoos, T-shirts, shoes and even homewares, as synonymous now with Japan as the country's flag.
When it was printed, Hokusai was already a star among Japan's ukiyo-e (woodblock print) artists, and well into his 70s, the wave was just one of a suite of prints called Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji (look to the distance and you'll see the intended focus of the work in the background). The series was so popular that Hokusai added another 10, so there are actually 46 views.
In 1909, The National Gallery of Victoria bought one of the original prints – "originals" are from the woodblock's first run, usually of 200 prints – but it doesn't come out of storage often; seeing the literal light of day gradually degrades the sensitive centuries-old paper.
But this month, the NGV's Great Wave will appear in a landmark exhibition of Hokusai's work, the biggest ever seen in Australia.
A collaboration with the Japan Ukiyo-e Museum in Matsumoto, which houses the world's largest collection of traditional woodblocks, the exhibition will showcase more than 170 of Hokusai's works, and complete sets of his five suites, which are rarely exhibited in their entirety. Alongside the prints he is famed for are rare paintings on silk, never seen here before, scrolls and hand-printed illustrated books.
If it seems remarkable that there are so many works produced after Hokusai was 70, it's because his career was as long as it was varied; it's estimated he created more than 30,000 images during his 60-plus years of working.
But even in old age the eccentric artist wasn't happy with his oeuvre; in his 70s, he famously declared all he had drawn by his 70th year "nothing worth taking into account".
"At 73 years I partly understood the structure of animals, birds, insects and fishes, and the life of grasses and plants. And so, at 86 I shall progress further; at 90 I shall even further penetrate their secret meaning, and by 100 I shall perhaps truly have reached the level of the marvellous and divine. When I am 110, each dot, each line will possess a life of its own."
Hokusai made it to 89, reportedly exclaiming on his deathbed: "If only Heaven will give me just another 10 years ... Just another five more years, then I could become a real painter."
Presumably, he'd be more than chuffed with his status as one of Japan's greatest cultural exports, and with the crowds his exhibitions draw around the world.
The NGV is expecting big things: Hokusai, after all, has rarely gone out of fashion – two years ago, during a huge exhibition at the Grand Palais in Paris, visitors queued for two hours; in London, the British Museum has extended opening hours for its exhibition Hokusai: Beyond The Great Wave.
"Ours has more works and complete series than both those shows," says Wayne Crothers, the NGV's senior curator of Asian art. "I'm bragging a bit, but it's worth bragging. This exhibition is unprecedented in Australia."
Seven years ago, Crothers contacted the Ukiyo-e Museum with a view to collaborating; the private museum holds the collection of the Sakai family, who have been collecting ukiyo-e woodblock prints since the late 1700s, some 3000 of them Hokusai works.
Yoshitaka Sakai, a wealthy paper merchant and art patron in the 18th century, began collecting ukiyo-e and the collection became a family affair; these days the museum – originally built as a storage facility, but opened to the public in 1982 – is overseen by 30-year-old Koji Sakai, Yoshitaka's great great-grandson.
Given that the practice of ukiyo-e was more mass-market printing than art, the Sakai collection is all the more extraordinary.
A commercial art form, in which the publisher played an equally important role as the artist, ukiyo-e were usually printed in runs of 200, emerging during the Edo Period (1603-1868), and specifically aimed at the non-elite classes.
"Ukiyo-e" translates as "pictures of the floating world"; the floating world being a reference to Tokyo's "pleasure district" of theatres, artists, and brothels.
During the Edo Period, when shoguns ruled, the social hierarchy they established placed merchant classes at the lower end of the ladder; with little political power they turned to art and culture as an area in which they could participate on an equal basis with the elite, and urban centres of hedonism emerged in the major cities.
Literature boomed, courtesans appeared and theatre flourished. These "pleasure quarters" of the new urban life were celebrated in the woodblock print.
Prints of beautiful women (bijin-ga), kabuki actors ( yakusha-e), sumo wrestlers, and erotica (shunga) were hugely popular, as were, later, scenes from history or folk tales, travel scenes and pieces celebrating nature and famous landscapes.
While the process of creating a woodblock was laborious, involving the illustrator, the carver and the printer, the works themselves were relatively cheap – the price, it's said, of a bowl of noodles – and were generally treated accordingly, sometimes stuck directly to walls, sent to friends and family as travel souvenirs, kept in drawers or worse.
Speaking through an interpreter at the Ukiyo-e Museum, Koji Sakai tells me they weren't seen as art at all.
"Sometimes in the Edo era," he says, "people even used ukiyo-e as toilet paper."
While this hasn't been verified, stories also abound that they were also used as wrapping paper once Japan opened up to international trade.
"When someone opened these boxes from Japan, they might find famous ukiyo-e," Sakai says. "At the time, the ukiyo-e was more like a flyer, a leaflet or even a newspaper … not art at all."
Sakai's ancestors, though, weren't using the ukiyo-e in the loo; Yoshitaka Sakai was on first-name terms with many masters of the artform, Hokusai included.
His son carried on the collection, also running a shop, and in 1982, his son, Koji's grandfather Tokichi, opened the museum.
"My grandfather would hold exhibitions throughout his life overseas, because international audiences liked these works," says Sakai. "He realised 'this is art', even if many Japanese didn't think so."
Hokusai's work spans book illustrations, manga (sketches of everyday life, flora and fauna and the supernatural, the first couple of which were instruction manuals for student artists, produced to help with the financial troubles that plagued him), and erotica (among them the widely known image with the octopus, The Dream of the Fisherman's Wife, which could be the erotic counterpart to his wave). But it was his depictions of nature and landscapes that cemented his reputation, particularly the 36 Views, which he began in 1830, aged around 70 and continued until his death.
Visiting some of the areas where Hokusai spent time – he moved frequently, often changing his name – it's hard not to be inspired by the landscape.
In late spring in Matsumoto, a mountain town in the Nagano Prefecture dwarfed by the Japanese Alps, snow-capped even as the temperature in town hovers over 30 degrees, much of the landscape remains as it did a century or more ago. Further north in the tourist mecca of "old town" Obuse, Hokusai spent much of his later life as a guest of merchant and patron Takai Kozan.
As famous for its chestnuts as its connection to Hokusai, the streets here are paved with chestnut tree blocks and lined by Shogun-era wooden houses. Here, Hokusai worked on his own art as well as fulfilling commissions for his patron, among them a huge work on the ceiling of the nearby Buddhist Gansho-in temple, a 34-square-metre phoenix, painted on the cypress wood in extraordinary greens and reds which have never been re-touched.
The mural, Ho-o Staring in Eight Directions, is said to be the largest existing work Hokusai made (another great Hokusai anecdote recounts the time he painted a 180-metre-long portrait of a Buddhist monk, using a broom as a brush).
Obuse also has its own Hokusai Museum, home to two festival floats with motifs including a dragon, another phoenix and his signature waves.
The NGV exhibition aims to reflect the diversity of Hokusai's prolific output, with the full suite of 36 Views (including the gallery's own Wave next to the Matsumoto print), as well as other nature-inspired series featuring bridges, waterfalls and his illustrations for popular books of the time, One Hundred Poems Explained By The Nurse and One Hundred Ghost Stories.
Hokusai's ghost illustrations are inspired by the Japanese tradition in which people would gather at night and tell ghost stories by the light of 100 candles; after each tale, one candle was extinguished, and the room grew progressively darker. It was said that ghosts appeared after the final candle was extinguished. While the title promises 100 macabre tales, there are actually only five known designs, which were phenomenally popular, and said to have influenced the rise of modern Manga comic books.
"We also have his series of birds and flowers, as well as the full set of 15 volumes of Manga," says Crothers (the NGV owns 11 of these volumes).
The exhibition layout is designed to lead visitors through Hokusai's different styles, from his early Kabuki prints, poetry album pages and perspective prints; Hokusai is acknowledged as one of the first Japanese artists to use European-style vanishing point perspective. The Great Wave is today an emblematic Japanese woodblock printing, but for its time, it was a synthesis of Western and Japanese styles: aside from the depiction of lower-class fisherman, fighting the wave, (the lower and agricultural classes never featured in ukiyo-e), the work features the device of diminishing perspective.
"This was a new technique," says Crothers. "Traditionally, Japanese works were very flat; they would just layer things behind each other, slowly reducing the size as they went back, like a stage set concept."
At this time Japan was still closed off from the world, trading only with the Dutch, and it's thought Hokusai was exposed to European paintings owned by Dutch merchants.
"Hokusai was fascinated with this new approach," says Crothers, "and one of the elements of success for selling his work was innovation. The public wanted something they hadn't seen before."
The bestseller also featured another of Hokusai's innovations – his use of Prussian blue, a dark blue pigment imported from Berlin. Although it was first used in the late 18th century, Hokusai's extensive use of the colour and the subtle gradations of it throughout the 36 Views was groundbreaking. Because it resists fading better than the vegetable dyes commonly used in the 19th century, much of these works remain as crisp and detailed as when they were made.
Visitors to the gallery, says Crothers, should expect to be surprised by the beauty and breadth of Hokusai's work.
"We've spent a lot of time thinking about how to show these works in an innovative way, drawing attention and imagination to engage with the works, and to create a journey – in this case, a journey back to 19th-century Japan."
Hokusai in popular culture
When Japan opened its borders in 1853 – just a few years after Hokusai's death – his work became famous across Europe, and influenced the works of many European greats. Artists including Monet, Degas and Toulouse-Lautrec collected his prints.
His Great Wave reportedly inspired French composer Claude Debussy to write La Mer, an orchestral ode to the power of the sea; the cover art for the sheet music, released in 1905, was an illustration based on Hokusai's wave.
Bohemian-Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke references the 36 Views in his poem The Mountain in the early 1900s, opening with the line "Six and thirty times and hundred times/ the painter tried to capture the mountain,/ tore it up, then pushed on again/ (six and thirty times and hundred times)."
The Belgian cartoonist Herge (Georges Remi) paid homage to Hokusai's wave in The Cigars of the Pharaoh with an image of Tintin and Snowy in a small boat facing down a huge wave.
Hokusai is at NGV until October 17. The writer travelled to Japan as a guest of NGV.
To celebrate the exhibition at the NGV, The Store by Fairfax has a collection of six works by Katsushika Hokusai. Visit thestore.com.au/hokusai