View Of Mt.Fuji

View Of Mt.Fuji places Sasajima within a long Japanese landscape tradition that runs from Hokusai's Thirty-six Views through the postwar [sosaku-hanga](/glossary/sosaku-hanga) generation. Compared to his more characteristic studies of Buddhist temple architecture in Nara and Kyoto, Mt. Fuji appears infrequently in Sasajima's body of work, and when it does, the artist treats the mountain not as the elaborately atmospheric subject of nineteenth-century [meisho-e](/glossary/meisho-e) but as a problem of flat compositional planes. The conical silhouette is well suited to the woodblock medium's reductive logic: a single curve, a few horizontal bands of foreground, and [bokashi](/glossary/bokashi) gradations across the slopes can carry the image. Carved and printed by Sasajima himself in the sosaku-hanga manner, the print retains the textural marks of the chisel and [baren](/glossary/baren). The result reframes the most recognizable subject in Japanese art through the austere visual vocabulary the artist developed for temple buildings.