Running

A study of a figure in motion, this print sits within the directness of Ono's sosaku-hanga practice — the artist designing, carving, and printing the work himself rather than dividing labor with a publisher's workshop. The single-word title aligns with the modernist tendency in the Japanese creative print movement to abstract human activity into elemental gesture. A subject reduced this way typically reads through bold, planar woodcut shapes, with knife marks and grain deliberately preserved rather than smoothed away as they would be in commercial reproductive printing. Ono came of age in the leftist current of the movement, producing prints of urban laborers and industrial scenes through the 1930s before his subjects broadened in the postwar decades. Whether this image depicts a worker, an athlete, or an anonymous figure crossing a city plane, the reduction of title and form reflects the break from the descriptive narrative tradition of ukiyo-e in favor of pared, expressive carving.