Fudo Myoo

The third numbered Fudo Myoo print confirms an extended engagement with the subject across Sasajima's career. Variants in such a sequence typically explore different aspects of the deity's iconographic program: a frontal hieratic stance in one, a three-quarter view in another, a closer focus on the head and flame-halo in a third. Sasajima's treatment of religious figures consistently favors monumentality over animation, fixing Fudo Myoo as a static icon rather than a deity in motion. The mokuhanga technique here likely deploys his characteristic heavy baren pressure to produce dense, matte black areas, with washi fiber visible at the margins where the pigment thins. As a student of Onchi Koshiro, Sasajima inherited the conviction that the carved block is itself the work; the printed image is a record of that block's surface, and his repeated Fudo Myoo subjects accumulate as variations on a sculptural rather than pictorial problem.