Ueno Zoo

A second Ueno Zoo composition depicting Tokyo's pioneering zoological gardens, opened in 1882 inside Ueno Park. Like its companion prints, this work likely belongs to or echoes the Shin Tokyo Hyakkei series of 1928-1932, in which Onchi and other sosaku-hanga artists each contributed views of contemporary Tokyo. The mokuhanga technique uses hand-applied pigment and the artist's own carving rather than the divided labor of the traditional ukiyo-e workshop, giving each impression slight individuality in color saturation and paper take-up. Onchi's zoo subjects depart from the carefully observed kacho-e tradition; instead, the zoo functions as a site of urban leisure, framed compositionally with the same reductive geometry he applied to railway stations and bridges elsewhere in his Tokyo views. The use of washi paper and baren burnishing remains consistent with traditional craft, but the design idiom — flattened space, suppressed line, broad color zones — places the work firmly within the sosaku-hanga modernist project.