Two visitors take photos of The Meeting Ukiyo-e: a Floating World of Edo City exhibition in Beijing on Friday. Photo: Courtesy of Chang Jing

Visitors take photos of The Meeting Ukiyo-e: a Floating World of Edo City exhibition in Beijing on Friday. Photo: Courtesy of Chang Jing

Visitors take photos of The Meeting Ukiyo-e: a Floating World of Edo City exhibition in Beijing on Friday. Photo: Courtesy of Chang Jing

A series of Japanese ukiyo-e artworks went on display at Beijing's Today Art Museum on Friday as part of a new major cultural exchange program between China and Japan amid the COVID-19 pandemic. 

The Meeting Ukiyo-e: a Floating World of Edo City exhibition features nearly 100 Japanese ukiyo-e artworks that are on display in China for the first time ever. 

As a genre of Japanese art which flourished from the 17th to 19th centuries, ukiyo-e, which literally means pictures of the floating world, cover various subjects including female beauties, scenes from history and folk tales as well as city views and landscapes. 

Paintings including The Great Wave off Kanagawa, one of the most recognized works of Japanese art in the world, are on display, so visitors can get to know the ancient city of Edo in Japan, a favorite outbound destination for Chinese before the pandemic. 

The new exhibition, which is divided over the sections "Into the Town," "Into the Room" and "Into the Soul," "marks a new beginning for Chinese-Japanese cultural exchanges" amid the coronavirus outbreak, which has forced many cultural events to be postponed and canceled over 2020, Ito Naoto, counsellor of the Press and Culture Center of the Embassy of Japan in China, said at Friday's opening, adding that these paintings are "difficult to see even in Japan and present a very good chance to get to know Japanese culture." 

The exhibition is set to run until May 6.