898008996

This untitled print by Kunio Kaneko, recorded under the reference number 898008996 on ukiyo-e.org, is a representative example of the artist's contemporary mokuhanga practice. Kaneko, a Tokyo-trained printmaker active since the late twentieth century, is best known for compositions that combine carved woodblock printing on handmade washi with hand-applied gold and silver leaf, a technique that has made him one of the most widely collected makers of gold-leaf prints working in Japan today. His subjects typically gather around the contemporary urban figure, often a young woman or geisha rendered in calm, decorative arrangements, but the visual logic of each sheet is rooted in long-standing Japanese conventions: flattened pictorial space, bold contour, and a deliberate balance between pattern and quiet passages of ground. In this impression the metallic surface is integral rather than incidental, catching ambient light so that the image shifts subtly as the viewer moves around it. That interplay between printed pigment and reflective leaf is what distinguishes Kaneko's work within the broader field of contemporary mokuhanga and connects it to the older Japanese tradition of gilded byobu screens and devotional panels. The impression is documented on ukiyo-e.org, which aggregates records from the Japanese Art Open Database and partner dealers to give researchers and collectors a stable point of reference for prints by living artists whose catalogues are not yet fully published. For collectors assembling a survey of postwar and twenty-first-century Japanese woodblock prints, this Kunio Kaneko sheet helps illustrate how the gold-leaf print has become a defining contemporary continuation of the mokuhanga tradition.