Iris No 156 — 花菖蒲 No 156

The one hundred fifty-sixth iris in Sugiura Kazutoshi's long-running series captures the hana-shōbu at peak summer bloom, a moment the Japanese printmaking tradition has returned to repeatedly since the Edo period. Where earlier masters like Hiroshige rendered irises as part of landscape compositions, Sugiura isolates the flower entirely, transforming it into a subject of pure formal and chromatic investigation. The layered silkscreen technique he developed produces petal surfaces of unusual tactile richness — photographs of the prints rarely do justice to the dimensional quality of the pigment layers.