Girl with fan

A girl with a fan — the traditional folding or circular fan held in a child's hands creating both a decorative element and a gesture subject — is rendered in Maeda Masao's bold figure-print manner. Fans appeared throughout Japanese visual art as both practical objects and compositional motifs, their geometry and decoration providing a contrast to the organic form of the figure holding them. Maeda's treatment of this classic subject brings his characteristic graphic directness to a theme with centuries of precedent in Japanese woodblock printing.