Object A

Object A (Mono A), produced by Onchi Koshiro in 1953, is one of the artist's late abstract woodblocks in which he reduces visual experience to a single contemplated form, eschewing any specific identification of its referent. The composition centers on a softly modeled mass — partly geometric, partly organic — that hovers within a tonal field of carefully judged color and embossed pressure. The deliberately generic title ('Object A') signals that Onchi is not depicting a particular thing but presenting an object as such, an exercise in seeing that asks the viewer to attend to weight, edge, surface, and chromatic temperature rather than narrative. The work belongs to the same late inquiry that produced his Lyric and Poem series, in which titles increasingly point toward states of feeling, sound, or pure presence rather than subjects, and reflects the influence of mid-century international currents — from European tachisme to American Color Field painting — filtered through Onchi's decades of woodblock practice. As founder of the Ichimoku-kai (First Thursday Society) and the most respected elder of the sosaku-hanga (creative print) movement, Onchi designed, carved, and printed Object A himself, sustaining the principle he had championed since the Tsukuhae magazine of the mid-1910s: each impression must be a complete personal statement. The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, which preserve this impression within their substantial holdings of mid-twentieth-century Japanese prints (https://ukiyo-e.org/search?q=onchi+object), document Object A as part of a broader body of Onchi material that allows scholars to chart his progression toward ever more reduced abstract statements. For students of Onchi Koshiro, the 1953 Object A is a particularly clarifying sheet: it shows him pushing woodblock toward something close to meditation, treating a single carved and inked form as sufficient ground for an entire print, and demonstrating once again the seriousness with which he treated abstraction as the natural mature language of Japanese printmaking.