XI Justice

Part of a tarot-themed series Takeda produced in 2016, XI Justice reimagines the Major Arcana through her characteristic register of contemporary domestic life rather than allegorical grandeur. Where traditional Justice cards depict an enthroned figure holding scales and a sword, Takeda's etching-and-aquatint treatment likely transposes the iconography into a recognizable modern interior, inhabited by a deadpan figure whose ordinary household routine carries the symbolic weight. The aquatint resist produces the soft graphite-grey tonal field she favors for skin, walls, and textiles, while the etched line carries the descriptive work — folds in clothing, the edge of a tabletop, the bevel of a cabinet. The intaglio process, with its slightly bitten line and velvety mid-tones, suits her flattened narrative sensibility, in which moral or cosmic categories are absorbed into the small adjudications of cohabitation. The series fits within her wider body of work reframing the Japanese postwar interest in modern interior space, here filtered through the European symbolic vocabulary of the tarot.