The Star Festival

Tanabata, the Star Festival observed on the seventh day of the seventh lunar month, commemorates the annual meeting of the stellar deities Orihime and Hikoboshi across the Milky Way. The festival is associated with bamboo, paper strips bearing wishes, and the visual spectacle of a summer night sky. Hamanaka's abstract treatment through collaged mokuhanga would engage these elements through color and compositional scatter: deep indigo and black fields carrying bright, isolated fragments suggesting stars, with the interrupted light of a clouded summer sky rendered through the discontinuities inherent in the collage process. The seasonal subject connects to a long tradition in Japanese woodblock printing of marking the ritual calendar through images, from [bijin-ga](/glossary/bijin-ga) festival scenes to the [meisho-e](/glossary/meisho-e) depictions of summer celebrations. Here that tradition is redirected into non-representational terms, with the Milky Way's logic — dense scattering of light across dark space — structuring the distribution of printed fragments on paper.