Face No. 5

Face No. 5, produced by Hagiwara Hideo in 1991, is a late-career addition to the long inquiry into the human visage that runs through the artist's catalogue, from the early Mask O of 1950 through the numbered Kamen (Mask) prints of the 1960s and into the Face series of his last decades. The composition centers on a frontal, vertical configuration: implied eye openings, brow, and mouth are suggested through carved passages and tonal weight rather than drawn as features, while a dense surrounding field of grain and inking anchors the head as a totemic presence rather than a portrait. By 1991, Hagiwara had spent more than forty years refining this kind of confrontational, face-adjacent imagery, and Face No. 5 reflects the continuity of his concerns: the work simultaneously engages Japan's deep tradition of masked performance and ritual — Noh, Gigaku, folk and festival masks — and a broader twentieth-century interest in archetypal, primal imagery shared with international postwar abstraction. As with all of his catalogue, the print was designed, carved, and printed by Hagiwara himself, in keeping with the sosaku-hanga (creative print) movement's foundational claim that each impression be a fully personal act. The Minneapolis Institute of Art, which holds this impression in its collection of modern Japanese prints (https://collections.artsmia.org/art/136924), positions Face No. 5 alongside the artist's earlier Mask and Kamen sheets. For students of Hagiwara Hideo, the 1991 print is a strong example of how, even in the final decade of his career, he continued to treat the human face as one of the most generative subjects available to abstract woodblock, returning repeatedly to it as a site where carving, inking, and personal gesture could converge.