Scene B

Scene B, also dated 1983, is the companion silkscreen to Scene A and shares its serial, alphabetic titling, indicating that Hanada conceived the two as related variations on a single pictorial problem rather than as discrete subjects. The silkscreen medium allowed him to register multiple flat color layers in precise alignment, a technical demand quite different from the carved-block and baren-burnished tradition of woodblock printing on washi. In Hanada's abstract idiom, paired works of this type often explore shifts in proportion, color temperature, or the displacement of a single shape across the field, so that the difference between A and B becomes the actual subject. The print belongs to the abstract current that Hanada developed after his studies under Ryohei Koiso at Tokyo University of the Arts, and reflects the postwar Hokkaido avant-garde's interest in reduced, non-narrative composition. Editioned prints from this period extended his painterly concerns to a more portable and reproducible format while preserving the disciplined geometry characteristic of his mature work.