New body

Titled "New Body" (Shintai), this mokuhanga belongs to Onchi's body of figurative and semi-abstract studies of the human form, a recurring concern across his career alongside his fully non-objective compositions. The title itself signals a modernist reorientation away from the classical bijin-ga ideal of the Edo period toward a contemporary, embodied figure conceived in the language of twentieth-century European modernism — Munch, Kandinsky, and the German Expressionists were all formative for Onchi. Such prints typically employ sparse linework, broad planes of color, and intentional registration shifts that emphasize the constructed, hand-printed character of the image. Onchi often layered transparent inks and exploited the texture of washi to soften contour into atmosphere, refusing the crisp outlines of nishiki-e. As a self-carved, self-printed sosaku-hanga work, the print foregrounds the artist's hand at every stage, repudiating the publisher-led collaborative system that had defined Japanese woodblock production for two centuries.