Winter (Fuyu)

Winter (Fuyu) from 1954 is a color woodblock print and among Uchima's earliest works in the medium, depicting the season of dormancy and cold that strips landscape to its structural essentials. Winter removes the concealing foliage of other seasons, exposing branch architecture, terrain contour, and the spatial relationships between landforms that summer hides under green. For an abstract artist, winter is the most sympathetic season — it performs its own abstraction on the visible world, reducing complexity to line, mass, and the stark contrast of dark forms against snow or pale sky. Uchima's rendering takes this natural reduction as a starting point, simplifying further into the pure relationships of form and tone.