Bund Nsaki

Bund Nsaki — the title abbreviating Nagasaki — depicts the city's bund, the waterfront promenade that fronted the foreign settlement established after Japan's reopening to international trade. Nagasaki's Dejima and adjacent concession areas left a strip of European-style warehouses, consulates, and quaysides along the harbor, and bund views typically combine architectural facades on one side with moored vessels and water on the other. Such compositions in mokuhanga lend themselves to layered horizontal registers: foreground paving, mid-ground buildings, harbor, and distant hills. Bokashi gradation across water and sky is conventional for marine subjects, applied freshly to each block before pulling with the baren on washi. The print joins Church In Nagasaki and Chimneys in establishing Tagawa Ken's body of work as a sustained engagement with Nagasaki's hybrid cosmopolitan character. This documentary, place-specific approach is consistent with sosaku-hanga and shin-hanga era topographical printmaking rather than earlier Edo-period meisho-e.