Number 18

Number 18, a 1974 woodblock print by Morozumi Osamu, is held at the Smithsonian National Museum of Asian Art, acquired through the Kenneth and Kiyo Hitch Collection of Modern and Contemporary Japanese Prints with funds from the Mary Griggs Burke Endowment. It belongs to the long numbered series the artist began in the early 1970s, after his 1972 receipt of the Japan Print Association Young Talent Award established him as one of the most promising figures of the early Showa period postwar print generation. Trained as a sculptor at Tama Art University, Morozumi developed a distinctive pinhole technique in which the woodblock matrix is perforated with nails of graduated thickness rather than carved with traditional chisels and gouges, producing dense fields of granular dots that read variously as astronomical, microscopic, or geological imagery while remaining fully woodblock prints in technique. The mid 1970s sheets of the numbered series, including Number 18, refine this vocabulary and favor centered spherical and circular forms — globes, ovoid bodies, paired spheres in tension — set against textured grounds built up from layered pinhole work, with strong tonal contrasts between dense dark fields and lighter, more open areas. The Smithsonian impression preserves the calibrated dot densities and the photographic looking gradients of light and shadow that distinguish strong impressions of Morozumi's abstract [sosaku-hanga](/glossary/sosaku-hanga) practice and that locate him within the late twentieth century strand of the creative print movement that retained the artist-as-craftsman ethos through new technical means.