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](/glossary/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](/glossary/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.