“Silence”

An untitled-mood piece in everything but name, 'Silence' likely depicts a depopulated rural or woodland scene — a lane, a clearing, or a still body of water — rendered to evoke quiet rather than to record a specific meisho. Mibugawa's handling tends toward soft pastel washes printed in flat, slightly absorbent layers on washi, with bokashi gradations doing most of the atmospheric work in place of keyblock outlines. The absence of figures is consistent across his catalogue and is part of why his prints read as contemplative rather than narrative. Carved and printed in the Kyoto studio of Unsōdō, where he has worked since joining a traditional woodblock publishing house in 1997, the edition would carry the hand-burnished baren texture characteristic of his self-printed editions. Within the wider contemporary mokuhanga revival, 'Silence' sits in the lineage of mid-century sōsaku-hanga landscape artists who pared subject matter back to mood, while retaining the publisher-edition apparatus of shin-hanga.