Untitled (Takayama 02)

The second sheet in Takayama's untitled triennial-period sequence continues his examination of the printed surface as sculptural document. Where his three-dimensional work foregrounds carved wood as both armature and finished form, the prints relocate that interrogation to the flat plane: the woodblock matrix becomes a low-relief sculpture from which an image is pulled. This logic places Takayama within a contemporary Japanese strand visible at venues like PATinKyoto, where the boundary between the print and the relief object is treated as porous. Technical features common to this mode include legible wood grain printed through ink, asymmetrical [baren](/glossary/baren) pressure that varies tone across the field, and the use of unbleached or lightly sized [washi](/glossary/washi) to register fibrous paper texture as part of the image. The absence of figuration — no kachō-e, no landscape, no figure — directs attention to material itself: the wood, the ink, the paper, and the trace of the hand that joined them. Within the broader trajectory of his practice, the print thus reads as a flattened sibling to the carved object rather than a separate medium.