Work

Another print in Onchi's continuing "Work" (sakuhin) sequence, in which the artist abandons narrative subject for purely formal arrangements of shape, color, and printed texture. By the 1930s and 1940s Onchi was producing a sustained body of abstract mokuhanga, often incorporating found objects - leaves, string, paper, fabric - as relief elements alongside cut wood blocks, and treating visible woodgrain as an aesthetic component rather than a defect to suppress. These pieces sit at the head of any account of postwar Japanese abstract printmaking: Onchi's students and admirers (Sekino Junichiro, Yamaguchi Gen, Hagiwara Hideo) carried the abstract sosaku-hanga vocabulary into international exhibitions during the 1950s. Each "Work" functions as a distinct compositional study rather than a uniform edition; the irregularity of the hand-pulled impression - inking, registration, baren pressure - is part of what is being shown.