The Road Ahead - Highland

The earliest dated work in this group, The Road Ahead - Highland is a mixed-media installation drawing on Scottish Highland landscape, produced just a few years after Imada completed her undergraduate studies at Tokyo Zokei University. The piece signals her early engagement with the British landscape tradition from a Japanese printmaker's perspective, applying compositional sensibilities developed in mokuhanga and [meisho-e](/glossary/meisho-e) (famous-place pictures) to a Northern European subject. The mixed-media format suggests printed [washi](/glossary/washi) components combined with additional materials, possibly including found objects or site-specific architectural responses. The 1992 dating places this within Imada's earliest installation work, predating the more developed light-based installations she would produce in subsequent decades. As a landscape piece, the work connects to a deep tradition in Japanese printmaking—Hiroshige's Tokaido, Hokusai's Fuji series—of treating geography as both literal subject and metaphysical territory. The Road Ahead framing introduces a temporal dimension, suggesting movement through landscape rather than static depiction, and reflects Imada's own situation as a recent arrival to the United Kingdom adapting her practice to a new cultural context.