Encounter

Encounter belongs to Yamaguchi's mature abstract phase, when he had largely abandoned representational subjects in favor of compositions built from interlocking shapes, irregular textures, and improvised wood grain. The title suggests a meeting of forms — likely two or more masses pressed against one another, their edges defined by the bokashi gradient transitions and granular fields he pulled from rough plank surfaces and unconventional materials such as sand, plywood, and string laid into the block. Pigments would have been printed in successive impressions over washi, with the baren leaving the slightly uneven absorption that gives his prints their tactile, painterly character. As a senior figure of the sosaku-hanga movement, Yamaguchi insisted on the artist as sole designer, carver, and printer, and works like this exemplify the movement's claim that mokuhanga could function as a vehicle for nonobjective expression on equal footing with contemporary Western painting and printmaking.