Papermaking

A print depicting the traditional craft of washi production — the very material on which mokuhanga prints, including this one, are themselves impressed. The subject carries a particular reflexivity for a sosaku-hanga artist: papermakers preparing kozo or mitsumata fibers, working the suketa screen across the vat, or drying sheets on boards represent the first link in the chain of materials that culminates in the finished print. Ono, as both a practicing printmaker and the leading historian of the creative-print movement, would have understood papermaking as more than a picturesque rural genre subject; it is the substrate of his own medium. The mokuhanga handling likely uses the warm tonality and absorbent texture of washi itself as part of the image, with simplified figures and tools rendered in restrained color. The print belongs to a current within sosaku-hanga that took craft labor — papermaking, weaving, fishing, agriculture — as serious subject matter rather than as decorative furigana, continuing in postwar form the social attention that marked Ono's prewar work.