Totem Poles
- Medium:
- Woodblock print
- Source:
- Ohmi Gallery
Key value factors: As self-carved and self-printed works, sosaku-hanga value is tied to the artist's reputation and edition size. Larger formats, earlier editions, and historically significant works command the highest prices.
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.
Totem Poles was created by Hiyoshi Mamoru (日吉護).
Totem Poles depicts figures, religious, and travel scenes.
