Small Garden, Shôwa period, dated 1967

"Small Garden," dated 1967, brings Tajima's abstract sensibility to one of Japan's most refined cultural subjects: the enclosed garden as a space of deliberate composition and controlled nature. The compression of a garden's elements — stone, moss, water, shaped plant — into abstract woodblock form allows Tajima to explore the spatial logic of garden design through the logic of print composition, two art forms that both operate through the careful placement of elements within a bounded field.