Edo Avant Garde

Edo Avant-Garde is a feature documentary film that tells the untold story of the vital role Japanese artists of the Edo era (1603 – 1868) played in pioneering "modern art". During the Edo era, Japan prospered in peaceful isolation from Western powers, while audacious artists innovated abstraction, minimalism, surrealism and the illusion of 3-D. Their originality is most striking in images of the natural world depicted with gold leaf on large-scale folding screens that anticipate 20th century installation art.