New Star No. 22

New Star No. 22 is a Japanese woodblock print by Yoshida Masaji that turns the cosmic vocabulary of stars and constellations into a flat, contemplative pattern. The title positions the work within Yoshida's numbered New Star series, in which the artist returned repeatedly to the motif of a luminous point set within a larger ground, treating each impression as a fresh variation on a single idea. Rather than rendering a sky in any naturalistic sense, the print isolates the star as a graphic event: a punctuating shape that emerges from a deeper field of layered ink and pigment. The work belongs squarely to Yoshida Masaji's postwar engagement with [sosaku-hanga](/glossary/sosaku-hanga) abstraction, the creative print movement in which artists designed, carved, and printed their own blocks. That self-printed character is essential to the work's reading; the slightly uneven density of the background, the wood grain showing through saturated passages, and the soft halation around the central form are not flaws but signatures of the Japanese woodblock medium as practiced by an artist working alone at the press. The palette tends toward subdued, atmospheric tones that allow the brighter central form to register as a quiet emission rather than a flashing accent. As No. 22 in the New Star sequence, the print invites comparison with the rest of the series, where shifting compositions and color choices reveal how Yoshida adjusted the same constellation idea across multiple iterations. This impression is documented through [ukiyo-e](/glossary/ukiyo-e).org, which catalogs the Honolulu Museum of Art's holdings of the work, securing its place in a major American collection of postwar Japanese prints.