Iris No 78 — 花菖蒲 No 78

The seventy-eighth iris in Sugiura Kazutoshi's numbered series is positioned in a productive middle phase of the project — the core formal vocabulary fully established, the exploration still very much in progress. The hana-shōbu at No. 78 shows Sugiura working with the characteristic confidence of an artist deep into a sustained project: compositional decisions that might have required careful deliberation earlier in the series are now made with the fluency of long practice. The layered printing technique at this stage produces its characteristic surface richness without visible effort.