Butterfly Poem No.8

Part of Onchi's lyrical Butterfly Poem (Cho no shi) sequence, this print pairs the motif of a butterfly with the abstract visual vocabulary he developed in the 1930s and 1940s. Rather than depicting an insect naturalistically, Onchi treats the butterfly as a poetic emblem — a fragment of color, a curve of wing, a scatter of marks across the washi — closer to a printed haiku than to a kacho-e flower-and-bird study. The series reflects his lifelong dialogue with literature, particularly his close ties to the poet Hagiwara Sakutaro, whose verse Onchi illustrated and whose lyric sensibility shaped his approach to the printed image. Self-designed, self-carved, and self-printed in the sosaku-hanga tradition, Butterfly Poem No. 8 exemplifies Onchi's conviction that the woodblock could carry purely emotional or musical content rather than narrative description.