Woman with fan

Woman with Fan, printed in 1969 as a stencil in an edition of eighteen, presents a female figure holding the decorated fan that was among the most important props and accessories in Japanese visual and performance culture. The fan's decorative surface — typically painted with seasonal imagery, landscapes, or calligraphy — provided Mori with a composition within the composition, and the figure's posture in relation to the held fan created the characteristic elegant tension of the bijin-ga genre. His stencil technique gave the figure and fan the bold, flat color areas that distinguished his version of this classical subject from more subtly modeled approaches.