Unite

Unite, dated 2021, is one of Masahiko Minami's recent contributions to the contemporary mokuhanga movement, documented on Artsy at https://www.artsy.net/artwork/masahiko-minami-unite. Minami (born 1957) is among the postwar generation of Japanese printmakers who carry forward the [sosaku-hanga](/glossary/sosaku-hanga), or creative print, principle of single-handed authorship inherited from Yamamoto Kanae, Onchi Koshiro, and the long line of mid-century practitioners including Hagiwara Hideo, Saito Kiyoshi, and Munakata Shiko. He has extended that tradition into the contemporary international mokuhanga community in which Japanese artists exchange method and exhibition with peers across North America, Europe, and Asia, a community sustained by the International Mokuhanga Conference series founded in Kyoto in 2011, the Awagami Factory paper mill's continued production of traditional [washi](/glossary/washi) for printmakers, and a network of specialist galleries and academic print programs that has made the medium an active contemporary global practice rather than a heritage technique. The title Unite suggests the artist's interest in convergence and the bringing together of layered fields into a single resolved image, an idea native to a medium in which each printed impression contributes a thin plane of pigment to an accumulated whole. The Japanese woodblock as practiced by Minami depends on mineral pigment carried in water on Japanese paper, printed by hand [baren](/glossary/baren) from blocks of mountain cherry, and refined through multiple impressions whose registration is controlled by the [kento](/glossary/kento) corner-and-edge guides that have been standard in Japanese print practice since the eighteenth century. Within that material vocabulary the artist's late twentieth and early twenty-first-century working method has favored a contemplative palette and a layered surface organized for sustained looking rather than immediate scene recognition. The 2021 dating places Unite within the artist's continuing recent practice 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 2011. The print should be read in that context: a hand-printed contemporary image whose meaning rests both in its own composition and in the inherited authority of the medium.