Rozan

Rozan is the Japanese reading of Lushan, a mountain range in Jiangxi Province, China, long associated with Chinese literati landscape painting and the source of Tang and Song poetic imagery. Yoshida traveled through China in the early 1920s, producing prints of the Yangtze, mountain villages, and Buddhist sites that fed into a body of Chinese-subject work distinct from his Japanese landscapes. A Rozan view would draw on the Chinese pictorial tradition of mist-veiled crags and stepped ridgelines — subjects that Yoshida would have encountered both in person and through Song- and Ming-dynasty painting. Translating this idiom into woodblock required handling extensive bokashi gradations — sometimes occupying nearly the full surface of the print — to suggest the layered atmospheric perspective characteristic of literati shanshui painting. Yoshida's Chinese subjects are less widely reproduced than his Japanese landscapes but represent a substantive engagement with the region's visual heritage. They predate his India travels by roughly a decade and demonstrate his early commitment to printmaking from foreign sources.