Face

Face (Kao), made by Onchi Koshiro in 1950, is a key example of the artist's mature engagement with portraiture pushed to the edge of abstraction. By the time he produced this work, Onchi had become the elder statesman of the [sosaku-hanga](/glossary/sosaku-hanga) (creative print) movement, having founded the Ichimoku-kai (First Thursday Society) circle of young postwar printmakers who gathered at his studio to discuss and pull experimental impressions. Face distills the human countenance into a deliberately reduced set of carved and inked elements — a roughly oval ground, vertical and rounded shapes suggesting eyes and mouth, soft tonal passages that read as cheek or shadow — without committing to a specific sitter or psychological narrative. The result hovers between portrait and emblem, recalling Onchi's lifelong fascination with the way woodblock could compress human presence into a few essential marks, a concern he had been working through since his celebrated 1943 Portrait of the Poet Hagiwara Sakutaro. As with all his late prints, Face was designed, carved, and printed by Onchi himself, the surface bearing direct traces of his chisel and inking — the foundational sosaku-hanga principle that he had championed since the Tsukuhae years of the mid-1910s. The British Museum, which preserves an impression of Face within its substantial Onchi holdings (https://[ukiyo-e](/glossary/ukiyo-e).org/search?q=onchi+face), groups the work with his Lyric and Poem series of the late 1940s and early 1950s, allowing scholars to read the head as a member of that broader meditative inquiry rather than as a discrete portrait commission. For students of Onchi Koshiro, the 1950 Face demonstrates how thoroughly he had absorbed lessons from Western Symbolism, Cubism, and his own decades of woodblock practice into a private idiom — one in which the human image could be evoked through subtle tonal modulation and a few carved lines, registering as deeply as any more conventionally rendered portrait.