Kukan No. 52

The fifty-second entry in Masaji's Kukan (Space) series represents a far-advanced stage in the artist's investigation of spatial abstraction through woodblock printing. By this point in the series, Masaji had moved well beyond initial explorations into territory where each new print had to justify its existence against dozens of predecessors addressing the same theme. The high number suggests that Masaji found the concept of space inexhaustible, each print revealing new configurations that earlier ones had not anticipated. The sosaku-hanga method of self-carved, self-printed blocks meant that Masaji's hands had accumulated extraordinary technical refinement over the course of this extended project, with muscle memory and material intuition guiding the carving tool as much as conscious design decisions.