Landscapes of Japan

Onchi's engagement with landscape sat alongside his lyric portraits and abstract compositions, and series under titles such as Landscapes of Japan gathered prints in which he treated the country's topography in the simplified, color-led manner characteristic of sosaku-hanga. Where the Edo-period meisho-e tradition emphasized identifiable famous places, Onchi's landscapes typically retreat from topographic specificity into mood and tonal register. The print would have been carved and printed by Onchi himself, in keeping with the sosaku-hanga insistence that the artist take full responsibility for every stage of production — a deliberate break from the traditional division of labor among designer, carver, printer and publisher. Onchi's landscape work draws less on Hokusai or Hiroshige than on Western Symbolist and Post-Impressionist sources, which he absorbed through his early association with the literary magazine Tsukubae. The image reduces its terrain to broad tonal areas with limited drawing, in line with his broader formal commitments.