Work no. 11

Part of Hamanishi's numbered series, Work no. 11 takes the saru (monkey) as its subject, departing from the artist's more frequent botanical and entomological motifs to engage with one of East Asian art's enduring animal symbols. Executed as an intaglio print — the broader category to which Hamanishi's signature mezzotint belongs — the image relies on the velvet blacks and graduated tonal passages that define his technical vocabulary, where a rocked copper plate is selectively burnished to coax light from darkness rather than describing form through line. Compositions in the Work series typically isolate a single subject against an expansive dark ground, allowing the textural specificity of fur, fingers, or facial features to carry the entire visual weight. The numbered Work titles, used across decades of Hamanishi's practice, signal the artist's preference for sequential, almost diaristic cataloguing over narrative titling. The print situates Hamanishi within the lineage of postwar Japanese intaglio printmakers — most prominently Yozo Hamaguchi — who adopted European mezzotint methods and refined them into a distinctly Japanese sensibility attentive to silence, isolation, and the close observation of the natural world.