Bijin

Bijin — literally 'beautiful person' — names a print that explicitly invokes the [bijin-ga](/glossary/bijin-ga) genre, the tradition of images of women that runs from Moronobu through Harunobu, Utamaro, and into the shin hanga work of Hashiguchi Goyō and Itō Shinsui. Lyon's contribution to this lineage is to construct the bijin-ga subject from photographic source material processed into a digital halftone and carved into woodblocks by CNC milling, then printed by hand on [washi](/glossary/washi) with water-based pigments and a [baren](/glossary/baren). The result preserves the framing conventions and quiet attentiveness of historical bijin-ga while replacing the linear key-block contour with photographic tonality built from thousands of small printed marks. Within Lyon's body of work, this print is among the most direct references to Japanese print history, foregrounding the conceptual aim of the practice: not pastiche but a genuine extension of the genre into a contemporary, digitally-mediated visual vocabulary while remaining technically faithful to mokuhanga's hand-printed materials and methods.