Harvard Art Museum

A second work by Ei-Q in the Harvard Art Museums collection, this print extends the artist's vocabulary of organic abstraction into another composition. The image source references a print cataloged under a different artist's name in the Japanese Art Open Database, suggesting possible cross-referencing or misattribution in the original catalog. Ei-Q was a founding member of the Demokrato Artists' Association, the postwar group that championed artistic freedom in the aftermath of Japan's wartime cultural restrictions. His prints from the late 1940s and 1950s reflect both the liberation of that moment and the influence of his prewar experiments with photograms, in which he placed objects on photosensitive paper to create cameraless photographs. The cellular, amoeba-like shapes in his printed work echo the shadow forms of those photogram compositions.