Hymns

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 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.