PHAVOS™ · UNIVERSES · FLOATING WORLDS · OCTOBER 1889
Jade Rabbit and Sun Wukong
Tsukioka Yoshitoshi
Meiji period · October 1889
01
The Artwork
Gyokuto Songoku (玉兎 孫悟空), usually translated as Jade Rabbit and Sun Wukong, was designed by Tsukioka Yoshitoshi in October 1889 for his series One Hundred Aspects of the Moon.
The image is built around an enormous full moon. Sun Wukong cuts diagonally across the composition, staff raised, while the white rabbit appears against the pale lunar disc. Yoshitoshi reduces the scene to a few strong shapes: black ground, pink-white moon, patterned robes and the suspended figures.
02
The Artist
Tsukioka Yoshitoshi (1839–1892) worked during the transformation of Japan from the late Edo period into the Meiji era. His prints drew on history, theatre, legend, literature and supernatural stories while the visual culture around him was changing rapidly.
One Hundred Aspects of the Moon became one of his major late series. Rather than treating the moon as a repeated decorative motif, Yoshitoshi used it as a link between stories drawn from different periods and traditions across East Asia.
03
The Story
The scene comes from the Chinese novel Journey to the West. The Jade Rabbit belongs to the moon and is associated with pounding an elixir there. In the novel, the rabbit leaves the lunar realm, assumes the identity of a princess and attempts to marry the travelling monk Xuanzang.
Sun Wukong sees through the disguise and confronts the rabbit. Yoshitoshi strips that larger episode down to the encounter itself: the Monkey King, the rabbit and the moon they are both visually tied to.
The moon is setting, stage and character at the same time.
04
The PHAVOS™ Interpretation
The intervention enters through the moon.
Yoshitoshi gives the moon more visual weight than almost anything else in the composition. It is the field against which both Sun Wukong and the Jade Rabbit become readable.
PHAVOS™ places its mark inside that lunar disc, using the image’s existing focal point rather than adding a second competing graphic.
The original scene remains intact around it. The intervention is small, but its position changes the moon from background into a shared space between Yoshitoshi’s image and the garment.
The piece takes its name from the quieter figure in the confrontation: Jade Rabbit.
05 · The Piece
Jade Rabbit
Yoshitoshi’s 1889 confrontation between Sun Wukong and the Jade Rabbit reproduced across the back of a heavyweight black T-shirt, with the PHAVOS™ mark placed inside the moon.
View the piece →