Fumées de Santal - Mandchoukuo

"Fumées de Santal, Mandchoukuo" (Sandalwood Smoke, Manchukuo) from December 25, 1948 depicts a figure from the Japanese puppet state of Manchukuo amid the fragrant smoke of burning sandalwood. The incense smoke's soft curling movement would have given Jacoulet a challenging formal problem — rendering the translucent, drifting column of smoke in the flat woodblock medium — solved through careful bokashi gradation and pale, warm pigments. The subject's cultural complexity (Manchukuo being Japan's colonial state in northeastern China) is embedded in the print's production date, years after the state's dissolution.