But first, a little history. Kawase Hasui is an artist famous for his travel and landscape woodblock print designs depicting quiet scenes around Japan. He is one of the best known and most popular artists from the Shin-Hanga movement in the 1920s-1950s in Japan, generating an enormous body of work. One of our collectors recently acquired a set of woodblocks for a Hasui design that has not been printed in many years and asked us to put together a new edition.

This design has quite an interesting history. My understanding of it is that during Japan's more imperialistic era, the government sent artists to depict scenes from the empire's newly claimed territories to portray how pleasant their domains were.

I'm not going to dive deeply into a discussion about propaganda or arguments about the truthfulness of these campaigns, but I will say that it is especially interesting for this particular design to be reprinted today due to its subject matter. The scene portrayed is from Pyongyang, North Korea.

Of course, there was no country called North Korea at that time, and the Korean peninsula was occupied by the Japanese. The government situated in Pyongyang has been putting itself in the news very frequently in recent months, so I think it is interesting to get a glimpse at the region from close to 80 years ago.

Kawai-san is our printer working on this new edition of a 'lost' Hasui print, and he of course had to find out exactly what was on these blocks and how they lined up with each other. This can be really rough, so he just used a simple piece of copy paper and put that quick test print together. The key block (black outlines) is on the right.

Once he got a bit more familiar with the blocks, it was finally time to use some real washi and make some true test prints. Here is a picture Kawai-san working on the first few.

We've been in regular contact with the owners of these blocks, and Kawai-san has been working hard trying to get colors to match their desires, experimenting with bokashi (gradations) techniques and pigments, coordinating with the owners to get the image just right. Here are some of the test images he has produced so far.

This will not be a Mokuhankan publication; we are simply acting as a printing workshop for the owner of the blocks. They will presumably be available for purchase in the future, and we will let you know once we learn more.