Chance

An abstract composition whose title reflects Yamaguchi's engagement with the role of accident and unplanned mark-making in postwar printmaking, a concern shared with contemporaries Onchi Koshiro and Hagiwara Hideo. Works titled in this register typically rely on textured woodblock surfaces, found grain, and overprinting to generate forms that the artist could only partly anticipate, aligning Japanese mokuhanga with the international currents of art informel and abstract expressionism that gained influence in Japan during the 1950s. The print likely features broad fields of bokashi gradation, irregular block edges left visible as compositional elements, and possibly the impression of materials pressed into the block --- rope, fabric, or sand --- to produce surface incident that pure carving could not. Yamaguchi was a member of the Nihon Hanga Kyokai and a central figure linking the prewar sosaku-hanga generation around Onchi to the international postwar abstraction that earned the medium global prizes at the São Paulo and Ljubljana biennials.