Mirror I 1987

Mirror I, dated 1987, initiates the Mirror sequence that Sawada continued with Mirror II in 1989. The title points to reflection or symmetrical composition as the organizing concern of the print. The mokuhanga technique lends itself naturally to investigations of doubling, since the carved block produces a reversed impression of its incised image, and registered multi-block printing allows facing or paired forms to be brought into precise alignment on [washi](/glossary/washi). In the late twentieth-century Japanese print scene, abstract or semi-abstract treatments of single conceptual themes — light, water, mirror, space — were a recognizable mode within [sosaku-hanga](/glossary/sosaku-hanga) and the broader hangaten exhibition culture. Working in 1987, Sawada belongs to a generation of printmakers carrying the creative-print impulse forward into late-Showa modernism, where the woodblock served less as a vehicle for representational subjects than as a surface for measured chromatic and structural inquiry.