Kizashi

Kizashi, produced by Hodaka Yoshida in 1960, takes as its title a Japanese word meaning sign, omen, or first indication — a quietly charged concept whose ambiguity is matched by the print's deliberately unresolved abstract surface. The composition is organized around a centered configuration of layered carved passages and modulated inking, with implied symbolic elements — a vertical axis, paired lateral forms, patches of saturated accent — emerging from a dense textured ground without ever resolving into legible iconography. The viewer is invited to read the image as a portent, a charged formal event in which something is about to declare itself, though the print is careful never to name what. By 1960, Hodaka had absorbed the international postwar abstract idiom through his travels in Mexico and the Americas and his engagement with experimental printmaking circles in Tokyo, and Kizashi reflects that synthesis: a Japanese conceptual title is matched with a fully international abstract vocabulary, both grounded in the medium of the carved woodblock. As the second son of Hiroshi Yoshida and the painter Fujio Yoshida, half-brother to Toshi Yoshida, Hodaka was by this point firmly committed to a program quite distinct from the Yoshida studio's landscape tradition, working at the experimental wing of sosaku-hanga (creative print) practice in which artists designed, carved, and printed each impression themselves. The National Gallery of Art, which holds this impression in its collection of modern Japanese prints (https://www.nga.gov/collection/art-object-page.49017.html), preserves Kizashi within an important institutional holding of postwar Japanese printmaking. For students of the postwar Japanese print, the 1960 work is a particularly clear example of how Hodaka could mobilize a charged conceptual title — an omen, a first sign — to anchor an otherwise non-objective composition, allowing the carved surface and reserved iconographic gestures to carry the weight of the suggestion.