Gas factory

A direct treatment of one of Ono's signature subjects: the heavy industrial plant as a modern Japanese landscape. Gas factories — with their cylindrical holders, lattice gantries, and chimney stacks — were a recurring motif in his prewar and early postwar work, and align with the leftist social consciousness that ran through his strand of the sosaku-hanga movement. The print is mokuhanga, almost certainly dominated by carved black masses against unprinted washi, with the geometry of pipes, riveted tanks, and structural steel reduced to flat, knife-cut shapes. Ono's interest is not picturesque but documentary: the gasworks stands as evidence of the labor and infrastructure that powered Tokyo. Compared to the lyric urban subjects favored by Onchi, this print belongs to the more austere, graphic line of sosaku-hanga that Ono shared with artists like Suwa Kanenori, treating industrial form as a worthy successor to the meisho tradition and asserting that the woodblock medium could speak to contemporary working life.