IMC 2024 Echizen submission

Submitted to the 2024 International Mokuhanga Conference (IMC) held in Echizen, Fukui Prefecture—a region historically associated with washi paper production—this print represents Sugimoto's engagement with the contemporary mokuhanga community gathered at the triennial event. The IMC brings together practitioners from Japan and abroad, and submissions typically reflect each artist's distinctive technical approach within the water-based woodblock medium. Sugimoto's work characteristically employs bokashi gradation printing, achieving tonal shifts through hand-pulled impressions with the baren on Japanese washi. Her practice, developed over more than a decade at Kyoto Seika University and informed by her doctoral research on Naobumi Seimiya, situates contemporary mokuhanga within a continuing art-historical lineage while exploring the poetic possibilities of gradation, registration, and the layering of transparent pigments. The Echizen setting of the 2024 conference—where the very washi substrates used in mokuhanga are produced—lent particular resonance to submissions engaging with the materiality of the medium itself, and Sugimoto's contribution sits within her broader investigation of how traditional technique can carry contemporary expressive intent.