Roots

Roots, dated 2015, is one of Masahiko Minami's mid-decade contributions to the contemporary mokuhanga movement, documented on Artsy at https://www.artsy.net/artwork/masahiko-minami-roots. Minami (born 1957) belongs to the postwar generation of Japanese printmakers who inherited the [sosaku-hanga](/glossary/sosaku-hanga), or creative print, principle of single-handed authorship from Yamamoto Kanae, Onchi Koshiro, and the long line of mid-century practitioners including Hagiwara Hideo, Saito Kiyoshi, and Munakata Shiko, and who have extended the medium into the contemporary international mokuhanga community in which Japanese artists share method and exhibition platform with peers from North America, Europe, and elsewhere in Asia. That community has been organized in recent years through the International Mokuhanga Conference series founded in Kyoto in 2011 and held subsequently at multiple Japanese and international locations, the dedicated journal Mokuhanga Hub, and a network of specialist galleries and university print programs that sustain the medium as an active contemporary practice. The title Roots gestures both to literal botanical structure and to the metaphor of ancestry and cultural source that has been a recurring concern in Japanese contemporary print art, where the technique itself, mineral pigment on [hosho](/glossary/hosho) or other Japanese paper printed by hand [baren](/glossary/baren) from carved cherry-wood blocks, carries the historical weight of a thousand-year medium descending from the eighth-century Buddhist printing tradition through Edo-period [ukiyo-e](/glossary/ukiyo-e) to the sosaku-hanga twentieth century. Where Edo-period ukiyo-e separated designer, carver, printer, and publisher into distinct trades, the sosaku-hanga inheritance and its contemporary mokuhanga descendants collapse those roles into the artist's single hand, an editorial decision that pulls every technical choice into the artist's authorial control. Minami's mature work has favored a contemplative palette and a layered surface in which carved line and printed field interact across multiple impressions, producing images whose meaning unfolds through extended looking rather than immediate scene recognition. The 2015 dating places Roots within a productive period of the artist's career and within the steady international circulation of contemporary Japanese mokuhanga through specialist galleries and the International Mokuhanga Conference series that has connected the global community of practitioners since its founding.