Print 29-1 (Hundred Layers of Color)

Print 29-1 belongs to Kouseki Ono's Hundred Layers of Color (Hyaku-sō) series, in which a single fine-mesh silkscreen carrying a field of tiny diamond-shaped marks is repeatedly overprinted on the same sheet. Each pass deposits a different colored ink in register with the last, so what reads at first as a flat composition is in fact a dense lattice of stacked ink columns rising several millimetres above the paper. The 29-1 designation indicates an early variant within Ono's numbered sequence, where the artist tracks both the print order and the specific palette deployed across roughly sixty to one hundred passes. Viewed in raking light, the surface reveals the physical record of every layer: undersides of earlier hues showing through gaps, top colors crowning each column. Produced after his 2006 M.F.A. at Tokyo Geidai, prints in this series translate the silkscreen — a medium typically prized for flatness — into a sculptural object, situating Ono within a contemporary Japanese printmaking lineage that includes Tetsuya Noda and Akira Kurosaki in its willingness to push a single technical premise to its limit.