#27 Considering Tokuyama Village

Tokuyama Village in Gifu Prefecture, dissolved as a municipality in 1987 to make way for the Tokuyama Dam, lay within the same prefecture in which Hayashi was born in 1961. The print, made in 1996 while the dam project was advancing toward the eventual inundation of the village, treats a place that was already vanishing. As an etching at #27 in the numbered sequence, it sits in the earlier portion of Hayashi's mature practice and predates much of the chine-collé and gampi experimentation visible in his later sheets. The landscape here is unlikely to be topographical record; the "Considering" titles in his series generally name the activity of thought rather than the depicted scene, and the print probably renders its subject through fragmentary etched line, aquatint tone, and the bevelled plate mark that frames each sheet. The biographical proximity — artist and subject in the same prefecture — gives the title a specifically personal weight rare in his more abstracted later work.