unknown - Scenes from the Tales of Ise - first half of the 17th century v8 - STICKER Vinyl Kiss-Cut Decal

This design reproduces a six-panel folding screen from the early seventeenth century, where courtly vignettes from the Tales of Ise unfold across a field of gold leaf.

Visual Elements & Composition

Gold leaf fills the ground and dominates the surface, giving the screen its luminous base. Against it sit pine green, vermilion red and pale celadon, with a dark teal border framing the whole panel. Courtiers in layered robes gather inside pavilions, a pine tree rises beside them, and a seated figure in a red robe rests in a garden. Bamboo and shrubs fill the spaces between scenes. Kana poetry inscriptions float on stylised gold clouds, so the text sits within the composition as an image rather than a caption.

Meaning & Symbolism

The Tales of Ise is a tenth-century collection of waka poems and their narratives, and it became a foundational text for Japanese aesthetic sensibility. Its episodes centre on courtly life, travel and romantic encounters, and they stress miyabi, the refined elegance of the court. The melancholy of transient love, set against the changing seasons, runs through the scenes. The pine signals endurance, the garden signals retreat from the capital, and the gold clouds carry the poems into the picture. This screen belongs to the Edo period, when classical themes were reworked through early modern craftsmanship and reached the aristocratic and rising merchant classes.

Cut to Its Own Outline

A kiss-cut sticker follows the outline of whatever it carries, so each scene can be lifted from the screen and placed on its own. A gold cloud with its poem, the pine, or a single figure in a red robe can stand alone on a laptop lid or the cover of a journal. The sticker brings a fragment of the screen into a daily surface, where the gold and vermilion can be read at close range, as the viewer would read a painted screen.