the layer of self_gfidl1

the layer of self_gfidl1, dated 2015, belongs to Masayuki Tsubota's long-running the layer of self cycle, an extended body of contemporary mokuhanga that the artist has developed across the 2010s. The print is documented on Artsy at https://www.artsy.net/artwork/masayuki-tsubota-the-layer-of-self-gfidl1, the platform through which much of his recent gallery-issued work has reached an international collector audience. Tsubota (born 1947) belongs to the postwar generation of Japanese printmakers that received the [sosaku-hanga](/glossary/sosaku-hanga), or creative print, idea of single-handed authorship from designers such as Hagiwara Hideo and Munakata Shiko and translated it for the contemporary international mokuhanga community, in which Japanese practitioners share method and aesthetic with peers from Europe, the Americas, and elsewhere in Asia, particularly through the International Mokuhanga Conference series founded in Kyoto in 2011. The layer of self title indicates the artist's working method: the print accumulates as a sequence of impressions from successive blocks, each layer adding a thin field of color, line, or pressure that complicates the surface and produces a final image whose depth is the record of its making. The alphanumeric suffix in the title functions as a series identifier within the artist's catalogue, distinguishing one variant of the working idea from another rather than naming a discrete subject. The image is non-representational in the sense that earlier sosaku-hanga abstractions by Onchi Koshiro or Hagiwara intended: the print is the record of a working process and the meditative attention that produced it, not the description of an external scene. Tsubota's contribution to the contemporary mokuhanga community has been recognized through gallery presentations in Japan and abroad, including outreach via Artsy and through publications devoted to contemporary mokuhanga as a global medium, and the 2015 dating places this sheet within a productive mid-decade window in which the artist refined the recursive method that defines the layer of self series. Within that program the print stands as a single iteration of a long inquiry into how the cumulative pressure of layered impressions on Japanese paper produces what the title insistently names: the self as a sequence of layers, each retained beneath those that follow.