Peony No. 29

Peony No. 29 continues Sugiura Kazutoshi's sequential study of botan, the tree peony whose layered, near-spherical bloom has occupied painters and printmakers across East Asia since the Tang dynasty. Sequential numbering allows Sugiura to vary palette, viewpoint, and background treatment from one print to the next while preserving the structural logic of a single isolated flower. The composition most likely centers a fully open bloom with the dense overlapping petals that distinguish the cultivar, framed by a few characteristic lobed leaves. As mokuhanga, the print relies on multiple color blocks to suggest the depth of the petal mass; bokashi gradation and overprinted half-tones replicate, in woodblock terms, the layered effects Sugiura achieves elsewhere with silkscreen and gold leaf. His decision to treat the peony serially places him within the postwar sosaku-hanga and contemporary Japanese print movements, where individual artists controlled the full process and developed distinctive lifelong subjects rather than working through publishers.