Peel of Print 5

Peel of Print 5 opens the second half of the series. Here Abe appears to allow contingent peeling — tears that follow paper grain or layer adhesion rather than a predetermined contour — to dictate composition. The result is an image whose form is partly authored and partly extracted from the material's behavior. This reading is consistent with the sōsaku-hanga inheritance in contemporary Japanese printmaking, where the artist's hand is present at every stage, but it pushes that inheritance further: the artist also yields a portion of formal authority to the substrate. Mixed-media construction supports this approach by producing inhomogeneous adhesion across the sheet, so that peeling becomes revelation rather than controlled drawing. As an artist trained at Kyoto Seika and now teaching in the Printmaking Course at Joshibi University, Abe occupies a position from which to articulate this material logic both in works and in pedagogy. The print belongs to a body of work that has run continuously alongside his teaching since 2017.