Hiraku

The title "Hiraku" — Japanese for "to open" or "unfolding" — points to a compositional motif of expansion or aperture. In Yoshikawa's abstract vocabulary, this likely manifests as a central form radiating outward, with overlapping color planes suggesting layered petals, fanning sectors, or a structural opening. Built up through multiple cherry-wood blocks pressed by hand with a baren onto absorbent washi, the work depends on kento registration to align a sequence of shapes and tones. Yoshikawa's mokuhanga typically employs saturated colors — vermillion, cobalt, ochre — kept distinct rather than blended through bokashi gradation, producing compositions whose energy comes from chromatic adjacency rather than tonal modeling. Hiraku belongs to her independent abstract practice, which since the 1990s has stood apart from the predominantly representational current of contemporary Japanese woodblock printmaking. Her works in this mode have circulated through the Japan-UK exchange network seeded at Northern Print in Newcastle from 1999 onward.