Hermann Bahr, in 1916, argued that the history of painting is the history of seeing. The technique changes
only when you change the way you see. The representation is modified to keep up with the changes in the way
of seeing, and the way we see it changes with the change in the relationship between man and world. The
psychologist Richard Nisbett, in 2003, supported the same thesis. According to Nisbett, the focus attention of the
“Western view” is on the most obvious objects, while the “Eastern view” captures the totality of the image and
the general context. Nevertheless, the discovery of the Western perspective by Japanese artists shows that they did
not change their “vision of the world”. The conceptualization of the world and the representation of space in the
Ukiyo-e prints are not connected: the representational techniques change over time and the artists adapt, time by
time, techniques of representation to the meanings that the artists want to communicate. These Japanese prints
demonstrate that there is no rigid cognitive process – western or Asian thinking – but they show, step by step, the
progress of the artistic research to discover new relationships between objects and space.
