Untitled (hiyoshi-mamoru)

A sixteenth untitled print by Hiyoshi Mamoru. His woodblock prints document a world — mid-century Japanese and Korean rural and small-town life — that has since been thoroughly transformed by economic development, urbanization, and the global homogenization of material culture. The specificity of his observations — the particular tools of traditional craft, the arrangement of goods in a traditional market, the social postures of figures engaged in communal activities — gives his prints an archival value that supplements their aesthetic interest.