Time of Silence — Chinese cabbage

A 2025 mezzotint depicting a single hakusai (Chinese cabbage), isolated against a darkened ground in the contemplative still-life mode Kobayashi has favoured in recent CWAJ submissions. The subject — a humble winter vegetable central to Japanese kitchen culture — is rendered through the velvet tonal gradations that mezzotint uniquely affords: the rocker-textured copperplate holds ink in the recesses of its burr, allowing the artist to burnish back toward the highlights and coax a continuous range from deep saturated black to luminous near-white. The leaf veins, ruffled outer edges, and tight pale heart of the cabbage offer the kind of textural variety that rewards the technique's slow, additive working method. The 'Time of Silence' title situates the print within a quietist still-life lineage, distinct from the more abstract 'Gunbu' (軍部) series represented by Kobayashi's 2005 plate in the U.S. Library of Congress's CWAJ Collection. As a senior figure trained at Toyo Art School in Tokyo, Kobayashi is part of the small cohort of Japanese mezzotinters sustaining a European intaglio tradition adapted to a distinctly Japanese subject vocabulary.