Dolls

Traditional Japanese dolls — hina dolls for the Girls' Festival, or kokeshi from the northern regions — carry deep cultural resonance as both domestic objects and symbolic figures. Asada Benji's "Dolls" print treats these objects with the careful compositional attention a landscape artist brings to topography: the arrangement of the dolls, their colors and textures, the surface they rest upon all composed with deliberate formal care. The subject allowed him to engage with traditional craft culture within a fine-art printmaking context.