Efficacy

Efficacy is characteristic of the philosophical, almost meditative titles Yamaguchi assigned to his nonrepresentational woodblocks during the 1950s and 1960s — words pointing toward a quality or state rather than a depicted subject. The print would consist of carefully balanced shapes registered in flat planes of color, set against backgrounds whose grain, knot patterns, and chisel marks have been deliberately preserved as visual incident. Yamaguchi favored sober, weighted palettes — earth reds, blacks, ochres, indigos — and applied pigments unevenly so that each impression carries the trace of hand-rubbed baren pressure. The result reads as a record of process rather than illusionistic depiction. This approach helped Yamaguchi win recognition at the São Paulo and Lugano international print biennials, where his work was received as a Japanese contribution to mid-century abstraction grounded in the discipline of mokuhanga rather than mimicking Western lithography or etching.