$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.
Mirage is a woodblock print exploring the visual phenomenon of heat distortion — the shimmering, unstable image that appears over hot ground, promising water or shelter where none exists. As a subject for abstract printmaking, the mirage is compelling because it is already an abstraction in nature: a real optical event that produces an unreal image, a landscape that dissolves its own solidity. Uchima's treatment likely uses wavering forms, uncertain edges, and color that seems to vibrate or shift, the woodblock medium's capacity for precise registration paradoxically employed to depict something that refuses to hold still.
Wakasa Kugushiko
1920
Color woodblock print; oban
Woodblock print
1934
Color woodblock print; oban
n.d.
Woodblock print; ishizuri-e, section of harimaze sheet
Curated cross-cuts that include this print.
Mirage was created by Ansei Uchima (内間安瑆).
Mirage depicts landscapes and abstract.
