Shallow-cut hand-printed woodblock relief on kozo (untitled)

This untitled work exemplifies Miida's signature investigation of the shallow-cut woodblock relief, in which the carved depth of the block is reduced to a minimal threshold so that the printed surface registers as a tactile, almost dimensional skin rather than a graphic impression. Worked on kozo washi—long-fibred, absorbent, and slightly translucent—the sheet receives the water-based pigment with the soft, fibrous edge characteristic of hand-printed mokuhanga, the baren pressure pulling colour into the paper rather than sitting it on top. Without a representational title to anchor reading, the print directs attention to its own facture: the residual tooth of the block, the subtle relief shadow cast where carved and uncarved areas meet, and the quiet variation in saturation that hand-burnishing produces across a single pull. The sheet sits squarely within Miida's Tokyo Geidai-rooted practice, where the artist carves his own blocks and personally prints each impression, extending the contemporary mokuhanga lineage through a reductive, surface-led vocabulary rather than the pictorial traditions of nishiki-e or meisho-e.