407-S

407-S by Sekine Yoshio is part of the artist's signature contemporary woodblock series in which a single object — the Japanese abacus — supplies the entire visual vocabulary. Sekine Yoshio (born 1922) emerged in the postwar decades when sosaku-hanga had already established the woodblock as a vehicle for individual artistic vision, and when Gutai and adjacent contemporary movements were pushing Japanese art toward radical abstraction and conceptual rigor. Sekine's response was to commit to one motif and explore it through hundreds of variations: each print numbered, each suffix ('S' here) signaling format or state, and titles deliberately withheld in favor of the registry-like designation 407-S. In the impression archived by Robyn Buntin of Honolulu on ukiyo-e.org, the abacus is reduced to a tightly composed grid of horizontal rails and rounded beads, the wooden frame functioning as both subject matter and pictorial border. Sekine's color is characteristically restrained — bands of muted ground separated by precise carved lines — and the strength of the work lies in the way subtle tonal shifts give weight to what might otherwise read as pure geometry. By exiling narrative and even pictorial reference, Sekine aligns his contemporary woodblock practice with the formal ambitions of postwar Japanese abstraction while preserving the medium's tactile authenticity: hand-carved blocks, registered impressions, and the slight irregularities that distinguish one pull from another. 407-S, like its sibling numbers in the same sequence, is best understood as one frame in a sustained conceptual project rather than as an autonomous picture. Documented by Robyn Buntin of Honolulu, the print provides a clear example of how a single domestic Japanese object — the soroban — could anchor a serious, decades-long body of contemporary woodblock work.