Hydrangea

"Hydrangea" — ajisai in Japanese — places Sasajima within the kacho-e tradition of flower-and-bird printmaking, a genre with roots in the Edo period that the sosaku-hanga generation continued to work through new formal languages. The hydrangea is a recognizably Japanese flowering subject, associated with the rainy season and Buddhist temple gardens, where the plant has been cultivated for centuries at sites like Meigetsu-in in Kamakura. The cluster of small four-petaled florets that compose each blossom invites the kind of repeated, rhythmic carving that suited Sasajima's relief-heavy approach. Rather than the delicate bokashi gradients used by earlier kacho-e printmakers such as Hiroshige, his treatment likely favors decisive black contour, exposed knife marks, and the textured surface his hand-printed practice produced. The subject also returns him implicitly to temple precincts, the recurring locus of his work, since hydrangea cultivation in Japan is bound up with monastic horticulture.