Mt. Oomaru of Ishikawa

作品賞析

In the “ Travelogue ” print series by artist Tsai Kuen-Lin, each work is composed of several woodcut prints, and takes the landscape or area around a single mountain as the theme; each may describe the area and the mountain or an important story from the local area. For this print, Tsai Kuen-Lin took one of the prints of his “ Travelogue ” series, “Hilltop View from Yushima Tenjin Shrine,” as a stencil for the screen print before you: “Mt. Ōmaru, Ishikawa Prefecture.” The material in the picture includes subway stations, bombers, landscape features and historical sites dating from the Edo period to World War II. Tsai was inspired by anecdotes about the Edo-period timber merchant Kanbē Yoshida and imagined the scene in which Yoshida’s workers dug up rocks and transported them down the mountain to land reclamation on the seashore, so he used gold ink to highlight the elements of this local story of excavation and reclamation. Tsai ingeniously assembled each set of woodblocks from the “Travelogue” series into the “Mountains” series of sculptures, thereby expanding the possibilities of woodblock prints.