Lang Lang

A mokuhanga portrait of the Chinese concert pianist Lang Lang, drawn from Artz's photographic source material and reworked through the multi-block registration of Japanese water-based woodblock printing. Lang Lang's public identity is bound up with the visible labor of performance — the hands at the keyboard, the angle of the head over the instrument — and Artz's portrait method typically focuses on the face or upper body in a way that strips away contextual setting. The print process requires carving each color into a separate block of shina plywood and pulling impressions onto dampened [washi](/glossary/washi) with a [baren](/glossary/baren), with [kento](/glossary/kento) marks ensuring registration across passes. The reduced tonal vocabulary of woodblock printing means subtleties of skin and shadow visible in a photograph must be resolved into discrete layers of flat or [bokashi](/glossary/bokashi)-graded color. The portrait sits within Artz's larger inquiry into how the body and likeness behave when moved from lens-based capture into the slower, more material rhythms of analogue print.