More Hearts

More Hearts signals Kristensen's openness to overtly contemporary, even pop-graphic subject matter — a register rare in traditional mokuhanga, which historically treated landscape, theater, beauties, and birds-and-flowers. The title suggests a repeated motif, likely a pattern composition where the heart appears multiple times across the sheet, exploiting the medium's natural facility with flat color repetition through registered blocks. Mokuhanga's hand-printed surfaces, with their slightly variable saturation across an edition, give such graphic subjects a tactile warmth that screen printing cannot match: the [baren](/glossary/baren)-burnished impression on absorbent [washi](/glossary/washi) softens the edges and embeds the pigment into the fiber. This kind of print places Kristensen in the lineage of the sōsaku-hanga tradition — the twentieth-century creative-print movement in which the artist designs, carves and prints the work — while pushing toward a more graphic, almost typographic vocabulary. It exemplifies his stated project of approaching mokuhanga without scholarly reverence, treating its technical apparatus as a flexible contemporary medium rather than a closed historical practice.