Lace#21

A 2012 work from Yoshiki's ongoing Lace series, printed on a transparent acrylic panel rather than washi or board. The title and series concept indicate an intricate pattern of perforated, openwork forms drawn from textile lace — fine ground meshes punctuated by denser flowering motifs. Yoshiki builds such images by passing the squeegee across the screen tens or hundreds of times, depositing layer upon layer of ink until the dried film stands proud of the substrate as a low relief; on acrylic, the cured pigment reads as a distinct physical body adhered to a glassy ground, and ambient light passes through the unprinted areas exactly as it would through the holes of real lace. The series sits within the body of work for which Yoshiki is known in Kyoto: a sustained investigation of silkscreen as a sculptural medium rather than a graphic one, in which the accumulated stack of ink itself, not the depicted subject, carries the weight of the image.