Kimun Kamuy II

Kimun Kamuy is the Ainu name for the bear, revered by the indigenous people of Hokkaido as the god who descends from the mountains. The Roman numeral indicates this is a second plate or state in an ongoing engagement with the subject. Hiroshima's choice of mezzotint suits the iconography: the rocker-roughened plate yields the dense, velvety blacks needed to evoke pelt and forest gloom, while burnished passages bring out the highlights of fur, eye, and snout. The sheet is mitsumata, a lustrous fine-fibered washi historically reserved for currency and presentation prints, which carries intaglio ink without the absorbency of softer kozo papers. Within Hiroshima's wider body of work — which favors insects, small animals, and quiet creaturely presences — the bear represents a turn toward larger northern fauna and a more explicitly spiritual subject, drawing on Ainu cosmology rather than the seasonal poetics of his earlier insect studies.