Thunder in the Farming Land

The third variant of Hiyoshi Mamoru's Thunder in the Farming Land continues his documentary engagement with Korean rural landscapes under severe weather. Thunder as a visual subject in woodblock print requires the artist to convey an essentially sonic and atmospheric event through static means: dark, billowing cloud formations rendered in bokashi, the particular stillness of figures caught mid-motion, and the visual weight of a sky pressing down on an open plain. This impression may differ from its companions in the treatment of the cloud masses or in the relative darkness of the sky-to-land tonal relationship. Hiyoshi's Western academic training — he studied oil painting before relocating to Korea — likely informed his sensitivity to volumetric cloud rendering, a quality not always prioritized in the more decorative conventions of Japanese print design.