One Hand Clapping

The title invokes the Zen koan attributed to Hakuin Ekaku—'What is the sound of one hand clapping?'—and the print belongs to a contemplative strand of Williams's mokuhanga in which titles signal Buddhist or Daoist content rather than topographic specificity. The image is almost certainly a quiet landscape: a single tree, a still pond, a mist-bound valley, composed around large passages of unprinted washi and a few carefully placed dark blocks. Williams's practice of carving and printing his own blocks in his Kyoto studio produces the slight irregularities of hand-pulled mokuhanga—the faint grain of the wood, the soft edge where the baren has worked the pigment into the paper—that give the silence of such an image its physical presence. Within his wider body of work, the koan-titled prints sit alongside the explicitly named villages and seasons as the more inward-facing register of a long-running meditation on rural Japan and the contemplative traditions that the landscape continues to carry.