Untitled

A second untitled woodblock print from Kay Brown's 2024 mokuhanga output. The Basic Training Program C at MI-LAB introduces participants to a sequence of technical exercises — single-block prints, multi-block color registration, and [bokashi](/glossary/bokashi) gradient work — and untitled prints in this context often correspond to specific instructional outcomes rather than independently conceived editions. The print would have been pulled by hand using a baren on dampened washi, with each color requiring a separate carved block keyed to a kento corner-and-edge registration system. The Echizen setting places the work within a regional tradition: Fukui Prefecture's papermaking lineage extends back over fifteen hundred years, and MI-LAB residencies routinely draw on local mills for materials. As a contemporary British contribution to the mokuhanga form, Brown's untitled works depart from the figurative subjects of Edo-period [ukiyo-e](/glossary/ukiyo-e) — the [bijin-ga](/glossary/bijin-ga), [meisho-e](/glossary/meisho-e), and [yakusha-e](/glossary/yakusha-e) of the historical tradition — and align instead with the abstract and semi-abstract idiom that has predominated in non-Japanese mokuhanga practice since the late twentieth century.