Floating

The title indicates a composition concerned with suspension and weightlessness — a single form, or a few, drifting in an indeterminate field. Hagiwara's technique of building images from many separately printed blocks allowed him to set shapes against atmospheric grounds in which neither edge nor depth is fully resolved. Reserved areas of washi serve as voids that refuse to close, so that floating forms remain optically unanchored to any defined ground plane. Such compositions belong to the broader sosaku-hanga investigation of pictorial space inherited from postwar abstraction, but adapted to Japanese materials: kozo paper, water-based pigments, and the cherry block printed with the baren. The print is consistent with Hagiwara's practice of selecting subjects that allow the eye to register the working of his medium directly, without distraction from narrative or setting.