Hiraodai (Fukuoka)

Hiraodai is a karst plateau in Kitakyushu, Fukuoka prefecture, known for limestone outcroppings scattered across rolling grasslands. The subject takes Yuzaburo well outside his usual Kansai territory and gives him a landscape governed by horizontal expanses and distinctive rock forms rather than the urban geometry of Kobe. The print translates the plateau's terrain into broad color fields—grass, sky, and stone reduced to overlapping tonal areas without the unifying line of a black keyblock. This keyblock-free approach, central to Yuzaburo's practice and inherited from his father Kawanishi Hide, is well-suited to landscape: the limestone outcrops can be massed as pale shapes against the deeper greens of the plateau, with edges softened by the registration of color block against color block rather than enclosed by ink. The print belongs to a strand of his work in which he documented places visited across Japan, treating regional landscapes as variations on his core compositional concerns rather than as topographic records, and demonstrating that the keyblock-free method handles open natural terrain as readily as harbor and bridge subjects.