Takenoko (Bamboo Shoots)

A mezzotint of takenoko, the young bamboo shoots that push up through the leaf litter of a bamboo grove in spring and are harvested as a seasonal vegetable in Japanese cooking. The shoot, conical and tightly sheathed, is well matched to the mezzotint plate: the overlapping bracts can be modeled in close tonal gradations from dense black to recovered light, with the soft pubescence on the sheaths registered through controlled burnishing. The subject sits within Hiroshima's broader practice of seasonal still-life prints — alongside insects, small animals, and other quiet observations from the calendar of the Japanese year — and connects loosely to the kacho-e or bird-and-flower tradition of close natural-subject prints, here translated from woodblock into the dark register of the rocked copper plate. The 2006 print precedes the 2010 Takenoko - Yama study and likely focuses on one or a small group of shoots at near-life scale.