Re-Issued Silk Aloha Shirt

Jakuchu Ito (1716 to 1800) was raised in the Nishiki area of Kyoto during the “golden age of art” of the Edo era, before Japan opened its doors to the outside world.

Jakuchu was self-taught, and passionate about painting from childhood. A student of Buddhism at the Shokoku-ji zen monastery, he devoted himself to the art of painting, taking inspiration from classic Chinese paintings from the Yuan and Ming dynasties.

With nature as his teacher, he also began making thorough sketches of all natural phenomena, eventually establishing his own richly colored style of painting, as portrayed here in his “Birds,Animals, and Flowering Plants in an Imaginary Scene”, originally a pair of six-panel folding screens.

This timeless expression of flora and fauna is a testament to Jakuchu Ito’s originality and genius. It is comprised of roughly 43,000 squares within each of the painting’s panels. Animal figures within the scene are alive and alert showing their true nature in a style characteristic of Jakuchu.

At Pagong, in celebration of the 300th anniversary of the birth of Jakuchu Ito, we wish to breathe new freshness into these extraordinarily detailed depictions of plants and animals with the use of a kimono dyeing technique called Kyo-Yuzen.