Wind

A representation of an intangible phenomenon, requiring the printmaker to convey movement through static form. Hiratsuka would have approached the subject through gesture rather than literal depiction — bent grasses, a leaning tree, or sweeping cloud forms cut directly into the block. His mature style emphasized bold, declarative carving in which the knife mark itself carried expressive weight, an approach rooted in [sosaku-hanga](/glossary/sosaku-hanga)'s insistence on the artist's hand at every stage of production. The reduction of subject to gesture aligns with modernist tendencies in interwar Japanese printmaking, paralleling Onchi Koshiro's experiments with abstraction. Within the sosaku-hanga ethos championed since Yamamoto Kanae's 1904 print Fisherman, conceptual subjects such as wind, sound, or season demonstrated that the medium could move past inherited [ukiyo-e](/glossary/ukiyo-e) categories of [bijin-ga](/glossary/bijin-ga), [yakusha-e](/glossary/yakusha-e), and [meisho-e](/glossary/meisho-e).