Kou '07

The "Kou" series — kou potentially 香 (fragrance), 光 (light), or 幸 (good fortune) — runs alongside the Private and Natu sequences in Yoshikawa's output. Dated 2007, Kou '07 falls within the artist's mature mokuhanga practice, by which point her compositional vocabulary of dense, juxtaposed shapes printed in saturated water-based pigments was fully consolidated. The print would have been produced through the standard mokuhanga sequence: separate cherry-wood blocks for each color, kento registration to align successive printings, pressure applied by hand-held baren onto dampened washi. Yoshikawa's preference for crisp, ungraded color edges over bokashi gradation gives works of this period a graphic, resolved quality. By 2007 she was an established figure in the Japan-UK print exchange network, having shown with the Northern Print studio in Newcastle since 1999, and Kou '07 sits within the period when her abstract practice was recognized internationally as one of the sustained non-representational currents in contemporary Japanese woodblock printmaking.