White Wall A, B (Shiro no kabe A, B) (artist’s proof)
- Date:
- 1991
- Medium:
- Photoetching and color woodblock print
- Source:
- Art Institute of Chicago
White Wall A, B (Shiro no kabe A, B), dated 1991 and held in the collection of the Art Institute of Chicago as an artist's proof, is a late-career woodblock and mixed-technique print by Hodaka Yoshida (1926-1995). The 'artist's proof' designation is significant for collectors because it identifies an impression Hodaka set aside outside the regular numbered edition, often as a working or reference print kept close to the artist's own records. By the early 1990s, only a few years before his death in 1995, Hodaka had reduced his palette and increasingly turned to the surface of walls as both subject and metaphor - cracked plaster, weathered concrete, layered posters - emblematic of the aging urban fabric of Japan. The choice of a 'white wall' subject builds directly on the [sosaku-hanga](/glossary/sosaku-hanga) conviction that the print is a self-sufficient artwork rather than a copy of something else: there is no landscape, no figure, no narrative, only the carved and inked surface itself rhyming with the wall it represents. Within the Yoshida family lineage, these late wall prints occupy an important position. They show the second-generation Yoshida arriving at a quiet, austere late style that is recognizably his own, distinct from both his father Hiroshi Yoshida's [shin-hanga](/glossary/shin-hanga) landscapes and his older brother Toshi Yoshida's animal and abstract prints. The Art Institute of Chicago's preservation of an artist's proof from this series provides scholars with a primary reference for understanding Hodaka's final decade, when he distilled a lifetime of experimentation into prints whose subject and surface had become almost the same thing.
Curated cross-cuts that include this print.
White Wall A, B (Shiro no kabe A, B) (artist’s proof) was created by Hodaka Yoshida (吉田穂高) in 1991.
