Red fuji

Maeda's Red Fuji enters a long lineage stretching back to Hokusai's Gaifu kaisei in the Thirty-six Views, in which the mountain's south face flushes vermillion at dawn during late summer. For a twentieth-century printmaker, taking up Aka Fuji is a deliberate gesture: it signals engagement with the canonical [ukiyo-e](/glossary/ukiyo-e) tradition while inviting comparison on the artist's own terms. In Maeda's hands the subject would typically be reduced to its essential silhouette — the cone, a band of foreground forest or cloud, a sky — and resolved through carved planes of color rather than the modeled atmospheric layering of [shin-hanga](/glossary/shin-hanga) Fujis by Yoshida or Hasui. Mokuhanga technique is well suited to the motif: a single broad block can carry the red flank, a separate block the snow-streaked summit, and [bokashi](/glossary/bokashi) can soften the transition where dawn light meets shadow. The print exemplifies Maeda's movement between the inherited iconography of [meisho-e](/glossary/meisho-e) and the formal economy of [sosaku-hanga](/glossary/sosaku-hanga).