Refugee's face (B)

A portrait head from Kitaoka's social-realist body of work, the strain of his career that drew directly on his 1945 deployment to occupied Manchuria with the Northeast Asia Culture Development Society and on the displaced populations he encountered during the chaotic Japanese repatriation that followed Japan's surrender. The (B) in the title indicates a variant or second state within a small series on the refugee subject, a working method consistent with the [sosaku-hanga](/glossary/sosaku-hanga) insistence on the print as the artist's own carved and printed object. Such heads are typically rendered with a heavy black key block carrying the structure of brow, cheekbone, and jaw in the manner of Kitaoka's teacher Hiratsuka Un'ichi, with one or two additional blocks for flesh tone and ground. The reduction of color and the frontal, unsentimental presentation align the work with the documentary impulse of postwar Japanese prints by artists such as Ueno Makoto and the Zōkei group. Within Kitaoka's catalogue these refugee prints stand at the opposite pole from his later abstract and landscape work, fixing in mokuhanga a memory the artist returned to throughout his long career.