Boats of Hong Kong

The cluttered working harbor of Hong Kong — its junks, sampans, and modern vessels overlapping in the crowded anchorage — is Karhu's subject in this 1987 print, a departure from his usual Kyoto streets into the noisy maritime world of a Chinese port city. Karhu traveled within Asia during his Kyoto years, and these travel prints demonstrate his ability to apply his architectural eye to new environments. The tightly packed boats create the same kind of interlocking geometric complexity that he found in Kyoto's tile rooftops.