Forest

A departure from Sasajima's central preoccupation with Buddhist architecture, Forest turns to the wooded landscapes that surround the mountain temples and rural shrines he documented elsewhere. The print likely depicts a stand of trees rendered in his characteristic dense black sumi, with trunks and canopy reduced to broad, gouge-carved silhouettes against the bare washi. Sasajima's landscape work shares the structural austerity of his temple subjects: the same flat planes, the same emphasis on visible carving marks, the same refusal of atmospheric softening. Rather than the seasonal lyricism typical of mid-twentieth-century shin-hanga landscapes, Sasajima's forests read as architectural studies of trees, treated as columns and vaults of an organic temple. The work belongs to the sosaku-hanga tradition of artist-printed mokuhanga, with every block designed, carved, and pulled by Sasajima himself in keeping with the principle Onchi Koshiro had impressed on him in the late 1930s.