Turmoil

Turmoil by Yuji Hiratsuka is a strong example of how the artist channels emotional content through the controlled vocabulary of contemporary intaglio. Hiratsuka, an Osaka-born printmaker who has lived and taught in the United States since the 1980s and held a long tenure as professor of printmaking at Oregon State University, is one of the most widely exhibited figures in current Japanese-American printmaking, and works such as Turmoil show why his prints have entered collections including the Library of Congress, the Portland Art Museum, and numerous university print study rooms. The title points toward inner disquiet rather than literal narrative, and Hiratsuka renders that state through his characteristic stylized figure: elongated, masklike, and pressed into a shallow patterned space that owes as much to Edo-period textile design and [ukiyo-e](/glossary/ukiyo-e) as it does to modernist European graphics. Technically, the print is built in the intaglio manner he has refined over decades, combining line etching, aquatint, and chine collé so that flat decorative passages of colored or printed paper are inlaid into a matrix of bitten line and tone. The result is a surface in which a quiet, almost ceremonial composure holds against the unrest implied by the title, a tension that is central to his mature work. Turmoil therefore reads on two levels at once: as a portrait of a psychological state and as a demonstration of how a Japanese-trained sensibility can be carried into a Western intaglio idiom without losing its identity. The image is documented through ukiyo-e.org, where it appears alongside earlier ukiyo-e masters whose pictorial language Hiratsuka continues to transform.