Fragments of Buddhist Sculpture at the Usuki Site in Öita

Fragments of Buddhist Sculpture at the Usuki Site in Oita is a Japanese woodblock print by Kobashi Yasuhide, a postwar [sosaku-hanga](/glossary/sosaku-hanga) (creative print) artist known for his sensitive engagement with sites of religious and archaeological significance. The work takes as its subject the famous Usuki Stone Buddhas (Usuki Sekibutsu) of Oita Prefecture on the island of Kyushu, a remarkable cluster of more than sixty stone-carved Buddhist images cut directly into the soft volcanic tuff of the Fukata valley between the late Heian and Kamakura periods. By the twentieth century many of these figures had suffered severe weathering, with heads, hands, and bodies broken away from the parent rock and scattered as eroded fragments at the foot of the cliffs. Kobashi Yasuhide responds to this state of partial ruin rather than to any imagined original wholeness, treating the broken stone faces and severed forms as the true subject of the print.