Sluice gate

Sluice gate depicts a piece of hydraulic infrastructure — the heavy timber or concrete gate that controls water flow at a canal mouth, a river outflow, or a reservoir. Such structures were common features of Tokyo's worked waterways, and they sit within Ono's long-standing interest in the engineered industrial landscape. The subject is suited to his graphic manner: the gate's massing, the ladders and walkways, the channel walls all reduce to broad geometric blocks against the surrounding water and sky. Compositions of this kind in his oeuvre tend toward symmetry and frontal address, the gate centered or set against a strong horizon, the carved block left to register both the hard edges of the structure and the looser texture of moving water. Within sosaku-hanga, Ono belonged to the wing of the movement that insisted on the modern world — its machinery, labor, and infrastructure — as fit subject for the medium, against the persistence of classical landscape and bijin-ga themes elsewhere in Japanese printmaking.