Scene A

Scene A is a 1983 silkscreen by Kazuharu Hanada, produced at a point when the Sapporo-based abstract painter was extending his oil-painting vocabulary into editioned print form. The title's neutral designation — a letter rather than a descriptive noun — signals Hanada's commitment to non-representational abstraction: the image is offered as a constructed visual field rather than a depiction. Silkscreen suited his approach for its capacity to deliver flat, evenly saturated planes of color with sharply defined edges, a register quite distinct from the gradated bokashi of traditional nishiki-e. Works of this kind from Hanada typically rely on the relationships between geometric or quasi-geometric shapes, opaque grounds, and intervals of unprinted paper to generate pictorial tension. Within his wider body of work, the early 1980s mark a period of consolidation in which Hanada, having returned to Hokkaido after his Tokyo Geidai training, aligned himself with the postwar avant-garde milieu of Sapporo while pursuing a personal language of measured, contemplative abstraction.