AO

AO — the Japanese word historically encompassing both blue and green — points to a print built around a single chromatic register rather than narrative content. In contemporary mokuhanga, single-word color titles typically signal a print in which the artist treats pigment itself as the subject, exploring how ao reads differently across multiple impressions, varying in opacity from the densely inked foreground to the [bokashi](/glossary/bokashi)-graded background. Kuroda's training combines traditional Japanese woodblock methods with the etching, drypoint, mezzotint, and aquatint techniques he studied in the United States from 1984 onward, and his prints often show the tonal subtlety associated with intaglio carried into the relief medium. The cyclists, umbrellas, and birds that recur across his oeuvre frequently appear silhouetted against fields of blue, suggesting that AO may either isolate the color as pure abstraction or apply it as the atmospheric ground for one of his recurring figurative motifs. Printed on absorbent [washi](/glossary/washi), the pigment penetrates the fibers rather than sitting on the surface.