Under the chair

Under the chair frames its subject from an unusual vantage point, the title suggesting a view directed beneath a piece of furniture — most likely revealing a cat, a recurring motif elsewhere in Fukami's output. Such low-angle compositions require careful management of cropped forms and negative space, and the woodblock medium accommodates these decisions through bold contour cutting and the use of flat colour fields registered across successive blocks. The printer's baren-burnished pressure on washi paper allows the dark space under the chair to read as a continuous tonal area, while sharp keyblock lines define the chair legs and the animal's silhouette. The composition reflects a tendency in twentieth-century Japanese printmaking to find pictorial interest in domestic interiors and offhand viewpoints, extending the technical vocabulary of ukiyo-e — once devoted to courtesans, actors, and famous places — to scenes of household intimacy.