Negative and positive

Negative and positive announces its concern directly: the figure-ground relationship that lies at the heart of woodblock printing, where every carved-away area becomes an inverse of every uncarved one. Shinagawa makes that structural fact the explicit subject of the print, likely playing dark and light shapes against one another so that the eye reads each as alternately foreground and background. This kind of formal investigation was central to the abstract wing of sosaku-hanga, which treated the technical conditions of the medium as legitimate artistic content. The print would have been hand-carved on a wood plank and printed by baren onto washi, with the registration of two or more blocks producing the polarity announced in the title. Compositions of this kind situate Shinagawa close to Onchi Kōshirō's later abstractions, where the woodblock became a vehicle for exploring shape, contrast, and the fundamental binary of cut and uncut surface.