Iris No. 156

Iris No. 156 belongs to Sugiura Kazutoshi's extended series devoted to the iris (hanashobu or ayame), a flower long associated with the fifth-month Boys' Festival in Japanese visual culture. The numbered series reflects a serial, almost scientific approach to a single botanical subject, with each composition offering a distinct framing of stem, leaf, and bloom. Working in the kacho-e tradition of bird-and-flower imagery, Sugiura isolates the iris against a flat field, allowing the upright sword-leaves and folded falls of the petals to carry the design. His mature practice combines gold-leaf passages with layered printing methods adapted from his Kyoto training in classical Japanese painting, and the woodblock format here continues that interest in luminous, textured grounds. The result departs from the narrative crowding of nineteenth-century nishiki-e in favor of a single sustained botanical motif, aligning Sugiura with the postwar generation that retooled traditional formats — including those held by the British Museum and Art Institute of Chicago — for contemporary aesthetic ends.