Encounter

An abstract composition whose title points to the relational core of Yamaguchi's mature work: the meeting of forms, colors, or textural fields on the printed surface. Such works typically center on two or more shapes set in dynamic relation --- overlapping, abutting, or held in tension across the sheet --- with the encounter staged through contrasts of value, edge, and surface. Yamaguchi was known for exploiting the woodblock's capacity for incident: rough-grained passages set against smooth bokashi, irregular block edges left visible, and impressions of unconventional materials embedded in the matrix. These techniques distinguished his output from the cleaner geometric abstraction of some contemporaries and aligned it with the tactile, gestural concerns of art informel that influenced Japanese postwar art more broadly. The print would have been made jiga jikoku jizuri, with Yamaguchi handling drawing, carving, and printing on washi himself --- the defining commitment of the sosaku-hanga movement that earned him international recognition at biennials in São Paulo, Ljubljana, and Tokyo during the 1950s.