Untitled

This print from Kiyochika's abstract series likely engages with his recurring interest in reflections on water as a way of dematerializing familiar urban subjects. The Sumida River and Tokyo's network of canals provided Kiyochika with surfaces on which gas-lamp light, moonlight, and lantern glow could be dissolved into vertical reflections, creating compositions in which the reflected image is as structurally important as the object itself. Printed on absorbent [washi](/glossary/washi), such reflections are rendered through wet [bokashi](/glossary/bokashi) effects — pigment bleeding slightly at the edges — that distinguish them from the sharper forms above the waterline. The abstract quality of these works follows naturally from the subject matter itself.