Hair

Titled simply Hair, this mokuhanga belongs to a small series in which Takasawa Keiichi takes a woman's hair as the central pictorial subject. The title isolates an element that bijin-ga printmakers from Utamaro onward treated as a marker of beauty, status, and mood, but in twentieth-century sōsaku-hanga the same motif becomes a formal study — long dark masses against the pale of the neck and back, the play of strand against skin, and the pictorial weight of black ink on washi. The keyblock work for hair in such prints is technically demanding, requiring fine cuts that retain individual strands while reading as a coherent dark mass under baren pressure. By titling three separate prints Hair, Takasawa signals a sustained attention to this single subject across multiple compositions, treating it less as an attribute of a portrait and more as a subject in its own right.