Woman of New York (Something I), Shôwa period, dated 1966

Woman of New York (Something I), dated 1966, was produced during the year Ikeda won the Grand Prize at the Venice Biennale — a moment of peak international recognition. The subtitle 'Something I' positions this as the first in a subseries, suggesting a sequential investigation of the Woman of New York theme. The female figure set against a New York context represents Ikeda's characteristic yoking of bijin-ga tradition to a Western urban milieu, updating a classical Japanese genre through postwar transpacific displacement. The 1966 date aligns this print with some of his most discussed work from the period. As a Shōwa-period woodblock print by an artist more commonly associated with intaglio and lithography, it demonstrates Ikeda's facility across media, applying the technical demands of woodblock to imagery that was simultaneously cosmopolitan and rooted in Japanese pictorial convention.