No Series Locomotion 2

Kunio Kaneko's Locomotion 2 belongs to a body of contemporary mokuhanga work in which the artist treats the printed surface as both image and ornament. Kaneko, who studied at Tama Art University in Tokyo and emerged in the late twentieth century as one of the most internationally collected makers of gold-leaf prints, builds his compositions from carved woodblocks pressed onto handmade washi and then finished with applied gold and silver leaf. The combination links his practice to the long Japanese tradition of leafed screens and Buddhist devotional imagery while remaining firmly within the modern hanga lineage that traces back to the shin-hanga and sosaku-hanga movements of the early twentieth century. In Locomotion 2 the title points to forward movement, and the print reads as a meditation on the quiet kinetics of everyday Japanese life rather than a literal depiction of machinery. Figures, garments, and decorative passages are flattened against a luminous metallic ground so that the eye is invited to register pattern and rhythm before subject. The image carries the hallmarks for which Kaneko is known among collectors of contemporary mokuhanga: precise key-block drawing, restrained color palettes against gleaming leaf, and a faint humor in the way modern bodies inhabit ornamental space. This impression is documented on ukiyo-e.org, the open reference database operated in cooperation with the Japanese Art Open Database, which preserves dealer and auction records for living print artists alongside historical ukiyo-e. For collectors building a survey of late twentieth- and twenty-first-century Japanese woodblock practice, Locomotion 2 sits comfortably beside Kaneko's better-known geisha and beauty subjects and helps locate his work within the broader revival of gold-leaf prints in contemporary mokuhanga.