Iris No 62 — 花菖蒲 No 62

Entry sixty-two in Sugiura Kazutoshi's iris series falls within a productive mid-series phase when the fundamental formal language of the project had been established and the artist was pressing further into its possibilities. The hana-shōbu at No. 62 shows the characteristic combination of botanical precision and formal abstraction that distinguishes Sugiura's work from more conventionally decorative flower printing — the iris is unmistakably itself, yet the compositional and chromatic decisions transform it into something beyond mere representation. The gold-leaf ground glows with particular warmth in this section of the series.