Star Dust 1

Star Dust 1 (1964) belongs to the small group of prints in which Hagiwara turned his abstract vocabulary toward the cosmos. Printed on paper with mica — a material that gives the surface a subtle glittering reflectivity — the work depends on the same dense overprinting and carved grain that drove the Stone Flowers and Soil series, but the subject has shifted from earth to sky. The result is a print that reads as a kind of cosmological field: dispersed flecks of mica embedded in dark ink, suggesting the slow accretion of stellar matter rather than the fixed constellations of older Japanese star imagery. Star Dust prefigures Hagiwara's later cosmic subjects — A Nebula (1987) and the Mandala series (1998 onward) — and shows how naturally his geological abstractions could be turned outward. The Minneapolis Institute of Art impression is part of its substantial postwar Japanese print collection assembled in the 2010s.