X (Alice)

X (Alice) places a female figure within or adjacent to the symbolic register of Lewis Carroll's protagonist, while the X in the title withholds or crosses out a primary identification. The parenthetical structure suggests the Alice designation is secondary, contested, or provisional — a reading rather than a statement. Watanabe's figurative prints often position women in ambiguous psychological spaces, and here the literary reference adds a layer of displacement: a character defined by her disorientation in an irrational world. In water-based mokuhanga, the figure would be built through warm skin tones set against flatter, more abstracted environmental passages. The composition likely emphasizes the figure's relationship to scale — large or small, contained or overflowing the frame — directly referencing Carroll's dimensional anxieties.