Near and Far #1

Near and Far #1 (2024) is the opening print in a series whose title proposes a meditation on spatial perception — the negotiation between foreground intimacy and distant remove that has long structured Japanese pictorial space, from the diagonal recession of Edo-period meisho-e to the flattened atmospheric zones of post-war sosaku-hanga. As a contemporary woodcut, the work is hand-pulled rather than mass-produced, with the carved block likely registering on washi through the pressure of a baren rather than a press. Saito's generation, trained through the Joshibi-to-Geidai pipeline, tends to work in the sosaku-hanga tradition of self-carving and self-printing, often combining flat color fields, subtle bokashi gradations, and exposed wood-grain texture to articulate depth without conventional perspective. The numbered title positions this as a serial inquiry rather than a discrete image — a format consistent with her standing in the CWAJ Print Show and the Japan Printmakers Association, venues where contemporary printmakers frequently develop ideas across iterative editions, returning to the same compositional problem with shifting registration, palette, or scale.