Japanese Garden Portland - Winter

This print records the Portland Japanese Garden in Oregon under winter conditions, one of several views Morimura has produced of the celebrated Washington Park garden designed by Takuma Tono in the 1960s. The composition gathers the elements of a stroll garden — stone lanterns, a pavilion or tea house, pruned pines, and a path of stepping stones — and reorganizes them into the artist's characteristic flat geometric facets, with snow rendered as broad fields of unprinted or pale-keyed washi against deep evergreens. Mokuhanga winter scenes traditionally exploit the white of the paper itself for snow, and Morimura follows that convention, using clean key-block lines and minimal gradation rather than heavy bokashi. The work reflects his ongoing engagement with diasporic Japanese gardens, which sit alongside his Kyoto and Kamakura subjects in a body of architectural landscapes that treat the four seasons as a structural principle, mapping changes in light and vegetation onto a stable repertoire of garden motifs.