Human Being

Human Being is a Japanese woodblock print by Gen Yamaguchi (1896-1976), held in the collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, where it documents the abstract turn that sosaku-hanga took during the postwar decades. The very title signals Yamaguchi's distance from the narrative subjects of classical ukiyo-e: rather than naming a courtesan, actor, or famous view, it announces the human figure as a generalized formal problem, a shape to be reduced and reconstructed in carved wood. Yamaguchi belonged to the generation of sosaku-hanga ('creative print') artists who insisted that the printmaker be solely responsible for design, carving, and printing, breaking from the Edo-period division of labor between publisher, artist, carver, and printer. He trained under Un'ichi Hiratsuka, a founding figure of the movement, and his mature work increasingly emphasized bold black-ink fields, exposed gouge marks, and silhouetted forms that align him with international currents in mid-century abstraction while remaining grounded in the materiality of the woodblock. The V&A's holdings of Japanese woodblock prints from this period place Human Being within a wider institutional narrative about how Japanese artists negotiated modernism after 1945, and the museum's acquisition of the sheet under that broad title reflects the work's emphasis on form over anecdote. Precise dating, dimensions, edition information, and color description for this specific impression are not given in the cited Victoria and Albert Museum record beyond what is published in its online catalogue entry, and no further details are claimed here. As a representative example of Gen Yamaguchi's sosaku-hanga practice, the print stands for a deliberately stripped-down approach to the human image, carved rather than painted, abstracted rather than described.