Trashi Labsta

The title transliterates a Tibetan or Bhutanese phrase — trashi (auspicious, blessed) recurs in Himalayan place-names and prayers — and the print belongs to the Asian-themed sequence Summers developed across the 1980s and 1990s following travels through Nepal, Bhutan, and Tibet. Such works typically render fortified hilltop dzongs, prayer-flag ridges, or terraced valleys reduced to large, flat colour shapes stacked into a near-heraldic composition. The bleed-through woodcut method, in which inked blocks transfer pigment through the back of the rice paper, gives every silhouette a soft penumbra rather than a hard edge, so architecture and landscape read as glowing forms rather than drawn structures. Summers cut his own blocks and printed by hand in small editions, sometimes registering colours by eye rather than with strict kentō marks, which produced the deliberate halos and slight overlaps that characterise his sheets. The print extends the modernist colour-woodcut lineage running from Munakata and the sōsaku-hanga movement into a distinctly American idiom.