Thrilling

Thrilling — titled in katakana (スリリング), the loanword form that signals a contemporary, colloquial register — works against the implied weight of fine-art etching by naming a sensation rather than a subject. The image is likely built around a moment, gesture, or unstable arrangement that produces the named feeling, rather than around a stable depicted object. Etching can register this kind of charged instability through linework that is left visibly searching: foul biting, scratched-in marks, drypoint burr, or aquatint that has been allowed to break down. Sugimoto's wider practice frequently uses such titles — direct, almost diaristic — to frame images that resist iconographic decoding, a habit shared with several of his Tokyo Geidai contemporaries. The mixed-media designation suggests that the printed plate is one layer among several, possibly with surface drawing or coloured washes added by hand. The result places the work closer to a contemporary studio practice that treats the print as a worked, singular object than to the editioned, reproducible logic of traditional Japanese printmaking.