No 12

Another in Toshi Yoshida's numbered abstract series from the 1950s and 1960s, continuing his investigation of non-representational mokuhanga. As with the other numbered works, the print likely consists of layered impressions from multiple cherry-wood blocks, combining flat color fields, gestural marks, and texture passages drawn from woodgrain and tool work on the blocks themselves. The Yoshida studio's technical infrastructure — skilled carvers, hand-mixed pigments, careful registration — supported these experiments at a level few sosaku-hanga artists working alone could match. Toshi's abstract phase coincided with his international travels and exhibition activity in the United States, where postwar interest in Japanese contemporary printmaking was sustained. 'No.12' sits within a corpus whose numerical titles deliberately resist representational reading, asking the viewer to engage with color, surface, and mark as ends in themselves. The sheet was pulled on washi, hand-burnished with a baren, and signed in pencil in the Western print convention Toshi adopted.