After the Gold Rush

The title borrows from Neil Young's 1970 album, transposing its elegiac tone onto the Japanese provincial landscape. Within Ozaki's practice the image likely depicts a depleted commercial frontage — a shuttered pachinko parlour, faded car dealership, or vacant lot adjoining a regional roadside strip — the visual residue of the post-bubble economy that has shaped Tōhoku's built environment over Ozaki's lifetime. The composition is built from a computer-generated preliminary sketch and executed with stencils in acrylic on canvas, producing flat colour fields, hard architectural edges, and the absence of atmospheric gradation that characterises his output. No figures appear; signage and structure stand alone. Working from Sendai and trained at Iwate University in Morioka, Ozaki belongs to a cohort of contemporary regional Japanese artists for whom the depopulating prefectures of the north supply a recurring subject. His inclusion in the 3rd PATinKyoto Print Art Triennale 2022 situates this stencil-based canvas within an expanded definition of print that admits the screen-derived, edition-adjacent flatness of his image-making.