Cover (かくす)

The Japanese title kakusu means "to hide" or "to conceal." This 2016 etching belongs to Murakami's earliest mature work, predating the elaborated multi-technique plates of 2018. As a small-format figural copperplate, the image likely centers on a partially obscured body or face — gestures of concealment recur throughout her practice as physical correlates to the surgical scar that informs her visual vocabulary. The line-only etching technique, without aquatint tone, produces a graphic quality reliant on hatching density to model form. Working in pure etched line at this stage of her career, Murakami explores what becomes a sustained inquiry: the body as container of hidden things — viscera, history, vulnerability. The print prefigures the intaglio investigations into bodily interiority she would later expand using lift-ground and spit-bite to produce wider tonal range. Like much of her output, the work is small in scale, requiring close looking from the viewer to read its incised line.