Wake up (6)

Wake up (6) is a serial work by Tadashige Nishida in which the artist returns again to a recurring motif and reissues it, gently altered, in the deliberate language of contemporary mokuhanga. The title gestures toward awakening, attention, or the first moment of clarity in a day, but the image refuses to illustrate any of these directly. Instead, Nishida composes the sheet from a small number of carefully placed shapes whose relationship feels alert and a little tentative, like consciousness gathering itself. The reading is left to the viewer, who is invited to bring their own sense of the title to bear on the abstract forms. This restraint is consistent with Nishida's approach to abstract Japanese woodblock practice across his career. The print's surface preserves the marks of its making in a way that only traditional mokuhanga can. The water-based pigments, hand-applied with a brush before each pull, settle into the paper to produce soft luminous fields, and the slight inflection of the woodblock's grain is allowed to remain visible. These qualities resist the flatness of commercial reproduction and reward unhurried viewing in person, where the eye can register the difference between adjacent passes of color and the quiet evenness of the printed plane. The sixth state in this group offers an opportunity to study Nishida's serial method: small changes in tone, scale, or balance produce notable shifts in feeling, demonstrating how much expressive range can be wrung from a stable underlying composition. The work is documented through ukiyo-e.org's open archival listing of Tadashige Nishida prints. Wake up (6) is a clear example of how contemporary mokuhanga can hold space for understated, abstract meditation on the most ordinary human moments.