$500–$4,000. Common prints: $500–$1,500. Key value factors: Uchima's luminous landscape prints appeal to collectors of both Japanese prints and modern American art.
Hymns is a woodblock print that borrows its title from sacred vocal music — songs of praise, devotion, and communal worship. For Uchima, a Japanese-American artist working in abstract forms, the reference to hymns suggests an interest in the spiritual dimension of visual art: the idea that color, form, and the handmade quality of woodblock printing can function as a kind of devotional practice. The [sosaku-hanga](/glossary/sosaku-hanga) philosophy that guided his work — the insistence that the artist perform every step of the printmaking process — already contains an element of ritual discipline. Hymns may represent the point where that discipline intersects with something explicitly sacred.
Kamakura Daibutsu
1930
Color woodblock print
1950
Color woodblock print
大仏
Woodblock print
1926
Color woodblock print; oban
Curated cross-cuts that include this print.
Hymns was created by Ansei Uchima (内間安瑆).
Hymns depicts religious and abstract.
