Ashura

Ashura, produced by Hodaka Yoshida in 1954, takes its subject from the celebrated eighth-century dry-lacquer image of the demigod Ashura preserved at Kofukuji in Nara, one of the most beloved sculptures in Japanese Buddhist art, and reworks its three-faced, six-armed figure through the disciplined idiom of postwar abstract woodblock. The composition is organized around a centered vertical presence in which carved passages and modulated inking suggest the layered heads, multiple arms, and inward gaze of the original sculpture without resolving into descriptive likeness. Where the Kofukuji Ashura is treasured for its almost human melancholy, Hodaka treats the figure as a totemic abstraction, allowing the carved surface and tonal weight to carry the weight of its iconography rather than literal reproduction. The print belongs to the same crucial mid-1950s moment as Pagoda in Muro and Snake, Mexico, when Hodaka was working through how Japanese classical and devotional subjects could be admitted into his increasingly abstract program without lapsing into either traditionalism or pastiche. As the second son of Hiroshi Yoshida and the painter Fujio Yoshida, half-brother to Toshi Yoshida, he was acutely aware of the family workshop tradition; choosing Ashura signaled a willingness to engage Japanese religious art on his own experimental terms rather than through the picturesque temple-view idiom his father had perfected. The work belongs squarely within the sosaku-hanga (creative print) movement, in which the artist personally designed, carved, and printed each impression. The Minneapolis Institute of Art, which holds this impression in its collection of modern Japanese prints (https://collections.artsmia.org/art/117644), preserves Ashura among other early Hodaka sheets that map this formative phase. For students of the postwar Japanese print, the 1954 work is a particularly clear example of how Hodaka could honor a canonical Buddhist subject while staging it through the textured, abstract surface that would come to define his international reputation.