Composition of Western glass, jar and jug

The Western still life represents a distinctive strand of Kawakami's work in which the imported object—glass bottles, jugs, jars, pipes, books—is treated as a subject in its own right, divorced from any human figure. The composition arranges three vessels of different proportion into a flat tabletop tableau, with each object reduced to its silhouette and a small number of internal divisions. Kawakami's sensibility here owes something to European still-life painting, given his exposure to Western art during his youth in Canada and his subsequent reading, but the handling is his own: flat color planes, visible carving lines, and the deliberate naivety of placement that he drew from folk signboards. The Western descriptor in the title is not incidental but the point: these are foreign objects, marked as such by their material (glass) and their forms, and the print is a meditation on the foreign-object-on-Japanese-table theme that runs through Kawakami's career. Self-printed on washi in the sosaku-hanga manner.