Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji
An analysis of Hokusai's famous series as a dynamic representation of change, exploring how it challenges traditional notions of landscape and art through the philosophy of Ukiyo-e.
Bayraktar, Kerem Ozan. "Fuji Dağı'nın Otuz Altı Görünümü" [Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji]. In Olimpos Sergileri II: Peyzaj [Olympus Exhibitions II: Landscape], edited by Süreyyya Evren. İstanbul: Taner Ceylan, 2021.
When Hokusai began his Mount Fuji series, Edo (modern-day Tokyo) was a city entirely different from its current form, resembling the settings we see in samurai films. The artist was already in his seventies when he started the project, living under difficult conditions in a region stricken with poverty and illness.
Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji (冨嶽三十六景, Fugaku Sanjūrokkei) is an Ukiyo-e series that ultimately grew to include 46 prints. The images primarily depict views of the mountain from Edo, interwoven with scenes of daily life, while a few were created from the perspective of the Nagoya region.
Katsushika Hokusai, Morning after the Snow at Koishikawa, ca. 1830–32, from the series Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji.
What elevates this series to one of the most compelling in art history is not Mount Fuji itself. It is Hokusai's masterful blending of Japanese painting techniques and philosophy, coupled with his poetic narrative skill, that sets him apart from his contemporaries. "Ukiyo-e," a style of woodblock printing especially popular during the Edo period, translates as "pictures of the floating world." The term is a homophone for a Buddhist concept meaning "world of sorrow," reflecting the core Buddhist teaching on the transience of all worldly things. This principle was deeply felt in the lives of samurai warriors, for whom closeness to death was a path to detachment from earthly desires. Later, in the hedonistic world of Yoshiwara, Edo's pleasure district where samurai were forbidden, the concept of Ukiyo took on a new meaning.
The writer Asai Ryōi explained Ukiyo with these words: "living only for the moment, savoring the moon, the snow, the cherry blossoms, and the maple leaves, singing songs, drinking wine, and diverting oneself in simply floating, unconcerned by the prospect of imminent poverty, buoyant and carefree, like a gourd carried along with the current of the river: this is what we call ukiyo."
This sense of flow and impermanence, central to both meanings of Ukiyo-e, permeates Hokusai's series. Mount Fuji is depicted from different angles, distances, and in varying atmospheres. The Great Wave off Kanagawa (1829-1833), perhaps the most iconic image in all of Japanese art, introduced this style to the world. Another famous work, Ejiri in Suruga Province (1830-32), which depicts a sudden gust of wind scattering papers and lifting hats, was famously reinterpreted by Jeff Wall in his 1993 photograph.
The unifying element across all the prints, and what defines them as a series, is the theme of change. Nothing is static. People are never posed; they are ordinary individuals engaged in everyday tasks. The seasons shift, and the force of the wind is ever-present, visible in the swaying grass, the fluttering kites, the sails of boats, and the rippling clothes and water. Mount Fuji itself is in constant flux, sometimes capped with snow, other times shrouded in mist. The mountain has no single, fixed color; it changes with the atmosphere.
Katsushika Hokusai, Viewing the Sunset over Ryōgoku Bridge from the Onmayagashi Embankment, ca. 1830–32, from the series Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji.
This emphasis on change extends to the composition. Hokusai does not present these views from a single, fixed vantage point. The perspective shifts with each work, repositioning the viewer. The mountain is almost never the central subject. These are not formal portraits of the mountain, but depictions of the mountain's appearance under specific, fleeting conditions. In this, Hokusai seems to anticipate the phenomenological theories of later European art. There is no single mountain, no definitive state. In many prints, it is just a small detail in a larger scene. The elements are distributed across the composition in a way that encourages the eye to move rather than rest on a single point.
The serial nature of the work pushes us beyond traditional art criticism, which tends to focus on individual masterpieces. By presenting different sequences, Hokusai tells us that the world is changing, marking this passage of time by capturing the subtle differences in a recurring subject. This focus on the "phenomenon of change," which we often associate with Impressionism, actually arrived in the West through the influence of Japonisme. Artists like Mary Cassatt, Edgar Degas, Claude Monet, and Vincent van Gogh were directly inspired by Ukiyo-e, adopting a style that emphasized change, asymmetry, and atmosphere. Both Monet's Rouen Cathedral series and Hokusai's Mount Fuji series are rooted in this shared understanding; they depict shifts in time and space by capturing changes in an object and its surrounding atmosphere.
When viewed as individual pictures, the series can suggest a world where time is frozen. But if we step back and see the artist’s sustained act of painting over time as the true artwork, we witness a systematic performance. To align with the work’s philosophy, we should see these prints not as discrete objects but as frames from a long-term experience, a record of the artist's ongoing engagement with his subject. From this perspective, it would be a mistake to view The Great Wave in isolation, as if it were a direct, unmediated observation. It is not the single image of the wave that represents the totality of change, but the entire sequence of which it is a part. The series as a whole contains a complex set of observations that no single print could ever convey on its own.
For these reasons, we should approach these works not with traditional theories of representation (asking what the mountain symbolizes), but with a holistic view. This means recognizing time as a dimension of the object, analyzing the work through the lens of change, and refusing to grant the medium more importance than the artwork itself. This approach is rooted in a principle of simultaneously considering and highlighting both similarities and differences. For example, only by looking at the entire collection can we form an idea of the region's geography. We see that it sometimes snows and sometimes rains; that the wind can be fierce or the air perfectly still. No single image provides this complete picture; the information emerges from comparing the prints and seeing them as a whole. A single picture presents a landscape as a static ideal. A series of pictures presents a system in flux, offering slices of a reality that has a before and an after. The prints are like stills from a long film, and for that very reason, they open up vast space for the imagination. We know, as viewers, that between any two frames, time has passed and much has changed. The empty space, the void, is crucial, not just as a compositional element within a print, but as the informational gap between the prints. This absence corresponds to all the unrecorded events that occurred in the interim.
We must also remember that Ukiyo-e prints were often designed for handscrolls and books. A scroll offers a profoundly different experience than a canvas hanging on a wall. It is not a window onto a fixed reality, as in traditional Western painting. Even when hung, it is displayed with wooden rollers that speak to its portability and transience. The experience of a book is similar. Flipping back and forth between pages recalls moving through the frames of a film, which helps explain the strong lineage connecting Ukiyo-e to modern Manga and Anime.
The habit of viewing paintings as isolated objects is something we learned from museums, with their standards of display and institutional framing. John Dewey noted that when an artwork achieves "classic" status, it is cut off from the human conditions of its creation; a wall is built around it.2 This problem, Dewey argued, lies not with art itself but with the systems through which it is communicated. Artists have long made work that is deeply embedded in everyday life, yet the art world continues to present these creations as idealized objects. This idealization applies not just to artworks but to artists themselves.
Art is physically enclosed by walls. Yuriko Saito observes that in the sealed environments of museums or concert halls, art is experienced as something immune to change. She writes,
“So, it does not matter whether I view Cezanne’s Mt. Sainte-Victoire in the middle of the summer or winter, during a rainstorm or under a sunny sky, or midday or at night, whereas it makes a big difference if I am viewing the actual Mt. Sainte-Victoire.”3
Exploring Hokusai's work today is meaningful not just for his historical significance, but also for the insights it offers into how we perceive and interpret what we see. To truly understand change, we must look beyond the painted elements and their style, considering also the context and manner in which we view the art, ensuring it remains connected to daily life. This can also have a different effect on our relationship with nature, which we today define through crisis. We can depict nature not as a picture of a separate, ideal reality existing somewhere "out there," but as an entirety of environments that constantly changes with us as we watch it, where no two moments are ever the same, composed not only of visible objects but also of atmospheres, flows, and physical forces.
1 Hickman, Money L. (1978). "Views of the Floating World". MFA Bulletin. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston: 4–33. JSTOR 4171617.
2 Dewey, John. Art as Experience. Penguin, 2005, p. 3.
3 Saito, Yuriko. Everyday Aesthetics. Oxford University Press, 2007, p. 36.