Arbitrariness-Labyrinth

The Japanese title translates more literally as "Labyrinth of Carved Lines," signalling a meditation on the engraved mark itself. Wood engraving on cross-grain endgrain (kiguchi mokuhan) permits the burin to cut very fine white lines through the dense surface of boxwood or similar hardwood, producing a linear density unattainable in plank-grain mokuhan. The work likely employs intricate networks of crosshatched and parallel lines to construct an interior space with no fixed orientation — a labyrinth made of mark-making rather than of walls. The 2018 date places it within Nikai's mature period, by which time he was an established figure in the small Japanese wood-engraving community. The piece reflects a tendency in his catalogue toward self-referential subjects: prints that are partly about the technique of their own making, where the engraved line is at once the means of representation and the thing represented.