Seki - Tokaidô

From Sekino's reinterpretation of the Tokaido road, the highway between Edo (Tokyo) and Kyoto whose fifty-three post stations were canonized in Hiroshige's nineteenth-century print series. Seki was the forty-seventh station, located in present-day Mie Prefecture, historically known as a junction with the Ise Kaido and a significant resting point for travelers heading to the Ise Shrines. Sekino's Tokaido series, produced over many years in the postwar decades, departed from Hiroshige's model by depicting the stations as they appeared in the mid-twentieth century — often quiet of figures and focused on architectural fragments, signage, or stretches of street that register the historical road's transformation under modernization. As a sosaku-hanga artist, Sekino designed, cut, and printed each block himself, frequently working at large sheet sizes and building the image from flat planes of color punctuated by precise contour cutting and selective bokashi.