Rock Garden 12, Shôwa period, dated 1960

Rock Garden 12, dated 1960, belongs to Hashimoto's extensive series of karesansui compositions in which he explored the infinite variation within what might appear a limited subject. The Showa-period dry landscape garden, with its raked gravel representing water and its stones representing mountains or islands, provided him with a subject that perfectly embodied his own artistic values: the reduction of complex natural forms to geometric essentials, the elevation of pattern to the status of meaning. Each numbered garden in the series represents a different configuration of the same fundamental vocabulary.