Wave Painting 3 (波絵3)

Wave Painting 3 (波絵3) is the third sheet in Ono Kouseki's Nami-e series and, like its companions, is built entirely from the artist's signature procedure: a single fine-mesh screen carrying small diamond-shaped marks is overprinted on the same sheet sixty to one hundred times, each pass introducing a new ink, until the paper carries a relief of pigment columns roughly five to six millimetres tall. By the third entry in the sequence, the cumulative knowledge of how individual colour orders behave allows for more deliberate chromatic decisions — for instance, reserving high-key whites and pale greens for the final layers so that the foam of a wave reads as the most physically prominent passage on the sheet. The print rewards close inspection: at reading distance the diamonds disappear into a continuous wave form, while at a few centimetres they resolve into a dense tessellated grid. The work positions Ono within a small group of Tokyo-trained printmakers using post-1990s silkscreen technology to reopen questions historically associated with the woodblock medium.