Hoshi Joichi

This print, bearing the artist's name as its title, sits within Joichi Hoshi's mature sosaku-hanga practice in which he served as sole designer, carver, and printer of every impression. Hoshi was past forty when he turned seriously to mokuhanga, and the catalog he subsequently built across the 1960s and 1970s is unusually unified in subject matter, returning again and again to single trees observed against open ground or sky. Technically, prints from this period are characterized by his fusion of woodblock printing with karazuri-style deep-relief embossing, which raised bark, branch, and ground textures into low-relief sculpture across the washi sheet. Color was typically restrained — earth grounds, ink-dark trunks, and occasional metallic pigments — with the embossed areas catching raking light and altering the image as the viewer moved. Within his oeuvre, a print carrying his own name often functions as a representative or signature image used in exhibition contexts.