City Love

City Love places Aoki's characteristic elongated figures within an urban setting, the city rendered as a compressed backdrop of angular architectural forms in stark black and white. The engraved line—cut into end-grain hardwood with a burin rather than carved across the plank—allows for the fine, precise strokes that articulate the figures' attenuated limbs and the geometric rhythm of city walls or storefronts behind them. The pairing of intimate human connection with an impersonal urban environment creates a quiet tension. Aoki's restrained tonal range, limited to the black of the ink and the white of the paper, gives the composition a graphic directness associated with his post-1960s printmaking practice in Fujieda, where he developed this vocabulary largely outside the established Tokyo print world.