Iris No. 151

With the series running well past 150 prints, Sugiura's Iris cycle constitutes the central ongoing project of his career, paralleled in scope only by his work on peonies. The iris (ayame, kakitsubata, hanashobu) is a richly freighted subject in Japanese visual culture, anchored by Ogata Kōrin's early eighteenth-century screens at the Nezu Museum and recurring through the [kacho-e](/glossary/kacho-e) of Hokusai, Hiroshige, and the [shin-hanga](/glossary/shin-hanga) generation. Sugiura's treatment isolates the flower from its traditional pond-and-plank-bridge setting, focusing instead on the structural architecture of the bloom itself — the upright standards, drooping falls, and central beard — rendered through layered color, refined contour, and surface texturing that approximates a tactile grain across the printed field. The high series number indicates the artist's commitment to incremental variation as a working method: each new print interrogates a slightly different angle, palette, or arrangement, accumulating across the series into a sustained formal investigation of a single motif. The sensibility recalls Kōrin's stylized treatment more than the naturalistic Edo flower print.