Artist’s Comment
“Since childhood, I have felt an undefinable sense of longing for the beauty and compositional clarity of ukiyo-e. When I gradually learned more about it in art school, I became increasingly aware of the distance between myself and ukiyo-e’s method of production through division of labor, and I began to think of it as a world I could never truly enter. So, when I received the offer to produce a woodcut print, I was quite simply surprised and excited by the possibility that I might finally have that opportunity, and I accepted at once.
In multi-color woodcut printing, where each color requires printing from a separate block, the individual colors become part of the structure, and with every stage the image seems to expand. On the other hand, my own work is often shaped by removing elements, and I was fascinated to see whether new possibilities might emerge from translating it into a woodcut print.”