Factory

The seventh print in this factory grouping suggests Ono treated the subject as an extended series rather than as isolated images, working through the industrial site as a Tokyo printmaker of the previous century might have worked through a celebrated shrine or bridge. This version likely concentrates on a single architectural element — a chimney stack, a corrugated wall, the truss of a gantry — isolated against an open ground. Such reductive compositions push the mokuhanga toward graphic abstraction without abandoning the documentary subject, a tension characteristic of Ono's work. The carved oban-scale block, inked and pulled by the artist himself in the sosaku-hanga ideal of jiga-jikoku-jizuri (self-drawn, self-carved, self-printed), embodies the movement's rejection of the traditional division of labor between designer, carver, and printer that had defined commercial ukiyo-e production.