Two Clowns

Created in 1965 in ink and color on paper, this woodblock print depicts a pair of clowns, introducing the world of performance and entertainment into Kinoshita Tomio's face-focused body of work. A clown's face is already a kind of mask: painted, exaggerated, and deliberately artificial, designed to project emotion to distant audiences. Kinoshita's interest in the boundary between the face and the mask finds its natural subject in the clown, whose identity disappears beneath layers of greasepaint and costume. The decision to depict two clowns rather than one creates a relationship between the figures, whether mirroring, complementing, or contrasting each other. The 1965 date places this print in the middle of Japan's postwar period of cultural experimentation, when traditional boundaries between high and low art were being actively questioned, and a clown could serve as a legitimate subject for serious printmaking.