Cicada

The cicada—semi, whose summer shrilling in Japanese forest and garden is one of the most culturally resonant sounds in Japanese nature experience—appears in Azechi's print with the bold simplification he brought to all natural subjects. The cicada's large body, its veined transparent wings, its short lived but immensely vocal summer existence, made it a natural subject for his graphic sensibility: a form that was already almost an abstraction, an insect built from clear geometric components that his woodblock carving could render with clean directness.