Myoshinji Temple gate

"Myoshinji Temple gate" depicts the sanmon of Myoshinji, the head temple of the Myoshinji branch of Rinzai Zen and one of the largest monastic complexes in Kyoto. Founded in 1342 on the former villa grounds of Emperor Hanazono in the Hanazono district of northwest Kyoto, Myoshinji preserves a sequence of monumental wooden gates, of which the two-storey sanmon (rebuilt in 1599) is the largest. The print belongs to the meisho-e or famous-place tradition, but executed in the sosaku-hanga register: rather than the publisher-driven topographic surveys of Hiroshige or Hasui's shin-hanga reinterpretations, Kitaoka approached the temple as a personal architectural subject. Compositionally, temple-gate prints of this kind typically exploit the strong horizontal of the entablature against the vertical pillars, with the dense black of the key block carrying the structural weight and bokashi gradations softening the stone foundations or surrounding foliage. Within Kitaoka's oeuvre, his Kyoto temple subjects sit between his earlier social-realist documentation and his later abstract landscape work as a more meditative middle register.