Road Under Repair

Road Under Repair (2021) is a mineral-pigment work on paper depicting a fragment of urban infrastructure—a stretch of street under construction, with the broken asphalt, traffic cones, and provisional barriers that characterise the temporary disruptions of city life. The choice of subject extends the meisho-e tradition of place imagery into deliberately unremarkable contemporary territory, redirecting the close descriptive attention of Nihonga toward the kind of scene a passer-by would normally ignore. The granular surface of iwa-enogu suits the rough textures of broken roadway and exposed substrate, and the layered application of pigment over a gofun ground allows Manabe to register the dust and weathering that distinguishes a working construction site from a rendered architectural drawing. The painting belongs to the period following her return from the ERASMUS+ residency in Poland and predates the formal Mineral Pigments on Intaglio series of 2023, suggesting an intermediate phase in which she tested the painterly handling of mineral materials before integrating them with the etched plate.