Road construction PARIS

Road construction PARIS depicts urban laborers at work on a Parisian street, drawn from Kitaoka's extended European residence following his postwar travels. The composition likely centers on figures bent over broken pavement, surrounded by the muted ochres of dust and the slate greys of the surrounding architecture. Kitaoka renders the scene through the carved-block vocabulary of sosaku-hanga, with each tonal area separated by a distinct woodblock impression and softer transitions handled through bokashi gradations. The subject continues a documentary impulse that ran through his career, from his wartime work in Manchuria to his later social-realist images of Japanese rural labor. Where earlier ukiyo-e travel views (meisho-e) presented the foreign as exotic spectacle, Kitaoka's Parisian scenes treat the city as ordinary working life observed at street level. The print belongs to a body of European subjects he produced during travel grants in the 1950s and 1960s, in which the format of the Japanese woodblock was applied to the textures of Western urban modernity.