When shadows cross border 46/50

Numbered 46 of an edition of 50, this 1988 screenprint engages Akasegawa's long-standing preoccupation with thresholds, marginal zones, and the shifting visibility of objects in everyday space. The title's reference to shadows crossing a border suggests a composition organised around interrupted forms or the moment one shape passes into another — a visual conceit consistent with the conceptual concerns Akasegawa developed during his Hyperart Thomasson period of the 1980s, in which he catalogued useless architectural remnants and the unintentional aesthetics of urban surfaces. Screenprint's flat, opaque colour fields and crisp registration suited his vocabulary of diagrammatic outline and photographic transfer, allowing the image to read as both document and abstraction. By the late 1980s Akasegawa had moved beyond his early Anti-Art provocations of the 1960s — the Yomiuri Independent assemblages and the contested 1,000-Yen Note works — into a quieter, more contemplative graphic mode that retained his interest in perception, boundaries, and the slippage between representation and object. The small edition size is typical of his print output from this period.