Dancer's fan

Dancer's fan is a companion subject to Kato Shinmei's other fan composition, focused on the mai-ogi as it relates to a dancer rather than to a generic fan still life. The print likely depicts the fan in active use — held aloft, opened across the dancer's gaze, or angled to suggest one of the kata stances of Nihon buyo — or shows the fan accompanied by other dance accouterments such as the tenugui hand-cloth. Shin-hanga prints in this register treat the fan as both prop and pictorial frame: the painted fan-face carries its own decoration, often coordinated with the season, while the radiating sensu ribs give the carver a structural pattern to articulate. The printer typically applies bokashi along the upper or lower fan edge to model the curvature. For Kato Shinmei, this print belongs alongside his bijin-ga and seasonal compositions, demonstrating the publisher-driven shin-hanga model in which a designer working in one register frequently produced paired or thematic series.