Tunagaru (Connection)

The Japanese title つながる means "to connect" or "becoming connected." Yoshikawa's abstract idiom here likely deploys interlocking or overlapping shapes that read as a visual proposition about linkage — forms meeting, edges abutting, color fields tied together by shared contour. As a multi-block mokuhanga, the work is printed with water-based pigments on [washi](/glossary/washi) using a [baren](/glossary/baren), which allows the layered, slightly translucent color registration characteristic of the medium. Yoshikawa typically works with a saturated, high-contrast palette, and [bokashi](/glossary/bokashi) gradations may soften transitions between adjacent blocks. The composition is consistent with her broader practice: dense, non-representational, and compositionally dynamic rather than calm. Tunagaru sits within a Japanese mokuhanga community that since the postwar Sōsaku Hanga movement has accepted abstraction as a legitimate vocabulary, and Yoshikawa has been among its committed practitioners — exhibited regularly through the Nagoya–Newcastle print exchange since 1999. The thematic title gestures toward something philosophical without committing to any specific narrative reading, leaving the chromatic and formal relationships to carry the meaning.