Gearing And piling of colors No.3

Gearing And piling of colors No.3 names its own subject directly: the layering, alignment, and accumulation of color that defines the mokuhanga process. As the third entry in a series, the print belongs to an extended investigation in which Shinagawa took the technical mechanics of woodblock printing as the work itself. Each color in mokuhanga requires a separate block, registered to the others through kento marks; building an image is a literal piling of pigments, and any misalignment becomes part of the composition. Shinagawa appears to have made this normally hidden infrastructure visible — overlapping shapes, offset registrations, or transparent washes that reveal the order of impression. The print thus operates as a kind of self-portrait of the medium, foregrounding what most prints try to conceal. Within sosaku-hanga the series exemplifies an artisan-philosophical strand: an artist who carved and printed every block using the act of printing as both means and subject, with the variant number signaling that the inquiry was ongoing.