Many visitors to Japan would love to buy an ukiyo-e (Japanese genre painting) woodblock print while here, and then put it on their wall. Dr. Lakra, an Oaxaca, Mexico-based tattoo artist, bought his own, and then added his own improvements to them.
A blasphemous reworking on the ¥50,000 originals — including a print by Edo Period (1603-1868) artist Utagawa Kuniyoshi — Lakra drew in ink Los Angeles-style gangster tattoos of praying hands, marijuana leaves, skulls and pinup girls onto the print's subjects.
Has any Japanese contemporary artist ever dared such an appropriation? If they'd taken their clues from Andy Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg (who erased a drawing by fellow artist William de Koonig) or the Chapman brothers (who made additions to a portfolio of the painter Goya's works), you'd think surely. But you would also think that you would have heard of such sacriledge by now in a country as firmly concentrated on its heritage.