I Can Only Understand Their Feeling

The first-person title positions the print as a confession: the speaker—presumably the depicted figure—claims a partial, qualified empathy with absent others. Osaka's compositions often externalize this kind of interiority by populating the surrounding space with objects, patterns, and fragments of text that function as projections of the figure's mental state. The lithograph would be built from multiple plate impressions: a key drawing in lithographic crayon establishing outline, with tusche washes and additional color stones supplying the dense patterning of dress, wallpaper, and floor. The figure is likely solitary, seated or standing within a shallow interior, with the unseen "they" of the title alluded to only obliquely—through an empty chair, a discarded piece of clothing, a drawn or printed image-within-the-image. The print sits within the body of editions Osaka has produced regularly since 2011, in which language and image cooperate to describe states that neither could carry alone.