Saigi

Saigi is a sosaku-hanga woodblock print by Saito Kiyoshi, one of the more concentrated single-subject pieces in a catalogue otherwise organized around long regional series — most famously the Aizu winter series of his native Fukushima and the body of Kyoto temple and garden subjects. Saito Kiyoshi's working method was that of the sosaku-hanga (creative print) movement: jiga, jikoku, jizuri, the artist alone draws, carves and prints the block, and the resulting print is held to the discipline of a single hand. That discipline is legible in Saigi: a reduced number of inked shapes, an architectural or figural subject pulled into broad planes and confident contour, the natural grain of the woodblock left to print through the open fields of the composition so that even the unprinted paper is faintly textured by the timber. That treatment of the wood as a visible material rather than a neutral matrix is Saito's signature device, inherited from the folk-craft (mingei) sensibility of his early career and brought into an internationally collected modern idiom. After his 1948 first solo show at Mitsukoshi and his 1951 prize at the São Paulo Biennale, Saito Kiyoshi's prints circulated widely in the United States and Europe, where pieces of this kind sat comfortably alongside the documentary Aizu winter series and the Kyoto garden subjects in collectors' portfolios. Saigi is documented in the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria's collection of postwar Japanese woodblock prints, aggregated on ukiyo-e.org. For collectors of Saito Kiyoshi, the single-motif prints are a useful counterweight to the long numbered series.