Hanga
Evening twilight at Haneda Airport by Kusaka Kenji — Japanese Mokuhanga (Japanese woodblock)

Evening twilight at Haneda Airport

by Kusaka Kenji

Medium:
Mokuhanga (Japanese woodblock)
Image courtesy of
Saru Gallery

Description

Evening twilight at Haneda Airport translates the Tokyo airfield into Kusaka's characteristic semi-abstract idiom rather than rendering it as a literal meisho-e cityscape. The composition likely organizes the dusk hour through broad chromatic fields and tonal contrast — saturated indigos or violets against warmer residual light along the horizon — using bokashi gradients to suggest the transition between sky, runway, and reflected ground light. Kusaka's recurring egg and cloud motifs may appear here as luminous forms suspended over the lower planes, doubling as atmospheric phenomena and as the modernist shapes that define his graphic vocabulary. Printed by mokuhanga on absorbent washi, the work depends on the depth and evenness of pigment achievable with the baren rather than mechanical reproduction. The subject sits within the broader postwar sosaku-hanga interest in contemporary Japanese landscapes, but Kusaka treats Haneda not as documentary scenery but as a vehicle for his ongoing investigation of color, edge, and tonal balance — the same concerns that earned him recognition at the Tokyo, Ljubljana, and Sao Paulo print biennials during the 1960s, and that link this image to his wider abstract output held in collections including MoMA and the British Museum.

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Frequently Asked Questions

Evening twilight at Haneda Airport was created by Kusaka Kenji (日下健二).

Evening twilight at Haneda Airport depicts night scenes and airport.