Ghost Story

This woodblock print taps into Japan's rich tradition of kaidan, supernatural tales of spirits and restless dead. Shinagawa brings the ghost story into the sosaku-hanga idiom, where the artist's personal vision shapes every aspect of the print from design through carving and printing. Japanese ghost stories traditionally feature yurei, spirits with unfinished earthly business, and the visual conventions for depicting them, trailing hair, pale complexion, absent lower body, are deeply embedded in the culture's visual imagination. Shinagawa likely distorts and abstracts these conventions through his expressionist lens, creating a ghost that belongs more to the world of modern psychological unease than to the formulaic horror of Edo-period ghost prints. The woodblock medium's capacity for stark black-and-white contrasts lends itself to the genre's atmosphere of dread.