Contemporary provocateurs could learn a thing or two from the venerable artists in “Edo Pop: The Graphic Impact of Japanese Prints,” at Japan Society, who mixed high and low culture in arch and urbane ways. In the show’s 100 or so ukiyo-e, or color woodblock prints, valiant samurai turn out to be Kabuki actors in costume; refined landscapes depict well-trodden tourist sites; and images of classical beauties accompanied by poems are more often than not portraits of courtesans.

These spirited images bring to life the “floating world,” a sort of Renaissance of popular entertainment enabled by a long period of peace and prosperity (1615 to 1768) after Japan became unified under a government in Edo, now Tokyo. Theaters, brothels, street festivals and poetry societies all flourished, and all were mirrored in ukiyo-e, which were relatively cheap to make and purchase.

The prints in “Edo Pop” come from the collection of the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, where a larger version of the exhibition was seen last fall. (That show was organized by Matthew Welch, the institute’s deputy director and chief curator of Japanese art; the Japan Society’s exhibition has been organized by its director, Miwako Tezuka.) Tucked in among the ukiyo-e are works by international contemporary artists, and not those you might expect. There is nothing by Takashi Murakami, for instance, yet a sprawling spray-painted mural by the artist known as Lady Aiko, one of his former assistants, is in the exhibition’s entrance foyer. And although Jeff Wall’s staged 1993 photograph “A Sudden Gust of Wind (After Hokusai)” isn’t here, the scattering of paper in that image has an echo in an installation by Jimmy Robert.

Works are grouped by the different categories of Edo ukiyo-e: beauties, actors, landscapes and “joy of life” pictures (broadly devoted to the pursuit of leisure, these might include still lifes of flowers or illustrations of folk tales.)