Landscape Cancer

Part of a zodiac-themed landscape sequence, Landscape Cancer pairs the symbolism of the crab with Hodaka Yoshida's vocabulary of flattened geometric forms and saturated color planes. Works from this group typically layer hard-edged shapes — bands, arches, gridded fields — over horizon lines or atmospheric grounds, producing compositions that read simultaneously as landscape and as modernist abstraction. The mokuhanga technique allows Hodaka to print broad, even color fields from carefully cut blocks while retaining the soft tonal transitions of [bokashi](/glossary/bokashi) at edges where forms meet. The print sits within his postwar move away from the representational landscape tradition his father Hiroshi codified, instead drawing on the visual languages of Pop, hard-edge painting, and Mexican muralism that he absorbed during travels abroad. Like other Yoshida prints, it is hand-pulled with a [baren](/glossary/baren) on [washi](/glossary/washi), retaining the tactile material vocabulary of the family studio even as its imagery sits firmly in international late-twentieth-century abstraction.