Totem Poles

A composition by Hiyoshi Mamoru devoted to Korean totem poles (jangseung) — a second treatment of this subject that appears elsewhere in his recorded work. The jangseung's complex carved and painted faces, their elaborate expression of protective deity in roughly carved wood, provided the printmaker with a subject that combined the ethnographic interest of traditional material culture with formal challenges: the rendering of carved three-dimensional faces in a two-dimensional medium, the translation of the poles' rough wooden surfaces into the woodblock's language of line and plane. Two treatments of this subject suggest sustained interest in its visual and cultural possibilities.