Andy Leleisi'uao

Named for the Samoan-New Zealand painter Andy Leleisi'uao, whose work explores diasporic narrative through dense figurative compositions, this print belongs to Michael Reed's mokuhanga portrait series of contemporary artists. The choice of medium — Japanese water-based woodblock printing on washi, pulled by hand with the baren — places the sitter within a tradition in which portraiture historically attached to the kabuki actor print and bijin-ga rather than to fellow painters; Reed's project redirects mokuhanga's portrait conventions toward the contemporary art community itself. Compositional decisions in such prints turn on what the keyblock will carry as line and what the color blocks will resolve as flat tone, with bokashi reserved for the modeling that would otherwise require continuous tone. Reed exhibited mokuhanga at the 2021 International Mokuhanga Conference in Nara, where the theme of sumi shaped the exhibited works toward an investigation of black ink — its weight on the sheet, its ability to register subtle gradation, and its dialogue with the unprinted field of the paper.