One More Scene From My Town - Fire Hydrant (Mo hitotsu no fukei, watashi no machi kara - shokasen)
- Date:
- 1983
- Medium:
- Photoetching and color woodblock print
- Source:
- Art Institute of Chicago
One More Scene From My Town - Fire Hydrant (Mo hitotsu no fukei, watashi no machi kara - shokasen), dated 1983, is a woodblock and photo-transfer print by Hodaka Yoshida (1926-1995) in the collection of the Art Institute of Chicago. By the 1980s Hodaka had developed a distinctive late style in which traditional woodblock printing was combined with photographic transfer techniques, allowing him to incorporate images of ordinary Tokyo street furniture - fire hydrants, manhole covers, signage, utility infrastructure - directly into the composition. This series, often translated as 'Another Scene From My Town,' is a sustained meditation on the everyday urban fabric of Tokyo, and it is one of the clearest expressions of how the [sosaku-hanga](/glossary/sosaku-hanga) ethos that Hodaka championed evolved through the second half of the twentieth century. Where earlier generations of Japanese printmakers, including his father Hiroshi Yoshida, had treated landscape as nature, temple, and mountain, Hodaka insisted that the contemporary city - its hardware, its small bureaucratic objects - was equally worthy of pictorial attention. The choice of a fire hydrant as principal motif is characteristic: humble, mass-produced, easily overlooked, yet rendered through painstaking artist-printed woodblock work and image transfer in a way that monumentalizes it. The Art Institute of Chicago's acquisition of works from this series places Hodaka in dialogue with international Pop and conceptual traditions while preserving his unmistakable identity as a member of the Yoshida family of printmakers. The work confirms Hodaka's position as a bridge figure between traditional Japanese block carving and the photo-mechanical experimentation of the late twentieth century.
Curated cross-cuts that include this print.
One More Scene From My Town - Fire Hydrant (Mo hitotsu no fukei, watashi no machi kara - shokasen) was created by Hodaka Yoshida (吉田穂高) in 1983.
