#69 — 86

Catalogue number #69 dates from 1986, the year before Hayashi completed his M.F.A. in printmaking at Tokyo University of the Arts. As a student-period etching tagged abstract, the plate likely shows the artist working through the technical and pictorial decisions that would define his later practice — the calibration of etched line against aquatint tone, the placement of incident in a small format, and the relationship between worked plate and untouched paper. Such early plates frequently carry visible plate edges and traces of biting that more polished later work suppresses. Without the descriptive titles that accompany Hayashi's mature output, this etching functions as a numbered exercise in mark-making, closer to a private studio note than a public statement. Printed in small editions in the artist's own studio, the sheet would have been pulled by Hayashi himself, on washi appropriate to the plate's scale. Within the longer arc of his work, the #69 group represents the foundation period from which the wind, root, and place imagery of the 1990s and 2000s gradually emerged.