Gundari Myōō (Kuṇḍali-vidyārāja) is one of the Five Wisdom Kings of Esoteric Buddhism, associated with the south and depicted iconographically with serpents coiled around the limbs and body. In this 1962 print Sasajima applied the sosaku-hanga discipline — carving and printing every block himself — to a devotional subject drawn from temple statuary he had studied firsthand at sites across the Nara and Kyoto regions. The Myōō's fierce visage and writhing serpentine attributes offered a compositional challenge distinct from his architectural subjects: dense, overlapping forms rendered through aggressive gouge work rather than the measured structural lines of his gate and pagoda prints. Printed likely on dampened washi with careful registration, the work would exhibit the textural immediacy characteristic of Sasajima's mature Shōwa-period output, where the woodblock's surface grain functions as an expressive element rather than a technical artifact to be concealed.
Curated cross-cuts that include this print.
Gundari Myôô, Shôwa period, dated 1962 was created by Kihei Sasajima (笹島喜平).
Gundari Myôô, Shôwa period, dated 1962 depicts figures, religious, and mythology.
