Window

Window (1959) — created in the same year as Midnight and Milky Way — completed a trio of early mature works that explored threshold states: the moment between consciousness and unconsciousness (Midnight), the boundary between individual and cosmos (Milky Way), and the frame between interior and exterior (Window). The window as compositional device was both literal — a physical opening in a wall — and metaphorical, representing all the selective frames through which artists and viewers engaged with the world. Hagiwara's carved surface rendered the window's transparency through the paradoxical means of physical mark-making.