Circus (Kyokuba)

Circus (Kyokuba) renders the theatrical world of the big top — acrobats, wire walkers, and equestrian performers — in Hagiwara's bold sosaku-hanga idiom. The circus had attracted Japanese artists since the Meiji period, when Western traveling shows introduced spectacular new forms of physical performance to Japanese audiences. Hagiwara's treatment uses the circus's inherent drama to explore his interest in the human body in extreme physical states, the performers' shapes distorted by effort and skill into something approaching the abstract.