Stone Garden, Ryoanji

Stone Garden, Ryoanji is a 1950 woodblock print by Saito Kiyoshi, one of his most recognizable subjects and a foundational work in the body of Kyoto-temple images that ran in parallel with his Aizu winter series. Ryoan-ji is the Zen temple in northwest Kyoto whose karesansui rock garden — fifteen stones set in raked white gravel — became, in the postwar years, an internationally legible symbol of Japanese aesthetic restraint. Saito Kiyoshi's print of the garden helped fix that visual identity for Western audiences who came to him through the same exhibitions that took his work to the 1951 São Paulo Biennale, where he won the top prize for Japanese painting. The print operates on the sosaku-hanga (creative print) principle of jiga, jikoku, jizuri — the artist alone draws, carves and prints — and treats the famous garden as a study in flat plane against ground: the dark mass of the perimeter wall, the gravel as a field of bare paper, the stones as compact black silhouettes. The natural grain of the block is allowed to print through the gravel, so that the white field is faintly striated rather than blank, a small but characteristic Saito move that ties this composition formally to the snow surfaces of the Aizu winter series. Stone Garden, Ryoanji is held by the Art Institute of Chicago (artwork 9897). For collectors of Saito Kiyoshi, this is one of the canonical sosaku-hanga prints of postwar Japan.