Poster (woodblock printed) anouncing the 24th annual woodblock exhibition

This functional print served as the announcement for the 24th exhibition of an annual woodblock society — likely the Nihon Hanga Kyokai (Japan Print Association) or a comparable organization with which Hodaka was affiliated through his postwar print circles. Exhibition posters produced as woodblocks rather than offset lithographs were a point of identity for these societies, asserting that the announcement itself participated in the medium it advertised. The format typically combined typographic elements — exhibition title, dates, venue — with a pictorial composition demonstrating the printmaking capacities the show would feature. Hodaka's contribution would have employed his characteristic modernist vocabulary: flat color planes, geometric or semi-geometric forms, and registration of multiple blocks to build layered fields. Such posters circulated as both ephemera and collector's items, and surviving examples document the institutional networks through which sosaku-hanga and abstract printmakers organized exhibitions, juries, and exchanges in postwar Japan.