#103 Planting the Seeds of Winds — Beginnings

"Planting the Seeds of Winds — Beginnings" reads as a meditation on germination and dispersal, the title pairing agricultural action with atmospheric drift. The print likely belongs to the small-format intaglio mode that Hayashi has refined since the late 1980s: a network of fine drypoint and etched lines worked into aquatint passages, the surface possibly extended by chine-collé inserts of gampi or other thin Japanese paper. Marks reading as seeds, spores, or windborne particles tend to scatter across an open ground in his practice, with the bevelled plate mark holding the image as a discrete event on the sheet. As number 103 in his ongoing numbered sequence, the sheet sits within the sustained personal vocabulary of calligraphic signs and quasi-landscape elements that he began developing after his 1987 graduation from Tokyo Geidai. The "Beginnings" subtitle suggests a generative position within a longer series, a starting point rather than a culmination.