Details

In Night Scene (Blue), Joichi Hoshi renders a hauntingly ethereal landscape, where the luminous silence of night descends over a labyrinthine canopy of leafless trees. A single monumental form dominates the foreground—an ancient, interwoven trunk whose limbs spread laterally across the field of vision like a net cast against the cosmos. Above it, stars glimmer in painterly clusters, their forms dissolving into the mottled indigo of the night sky, evoking both celestial mapping and spiritual abstraction.

Hoshi’s unique technique, combining traditional woodblock printing with metallic and mica-enhanced inks, imparts a surface iridescence that shifts subtly with the viewer’s gaze. The interplay of texture and tonality transforms the print into an atmospheric experience—one that suggests both the permanence of nature and the transience of starlight. The blue palette lends a quietude and introspection to the composition, and it is worth noting that this same design exists in a red version, equally rare and compositionally identical, yet distinctly different in mood and emotional temperature.

Connoisseur's Note

Joichi Hoshi, often referred to as the “poet of trees,” devoted the latter part of his career almost exclusively to arboreal forms. For Hoshi, trees were not merely botanical entities but metaphysical ones—symbols of rootedness, memory, and cosmic order. In Night Scene (Blue), his vision is distilled to its most essential: a vast, twilight space where the veil between the earthly and the celestial is thin, and the viewer stands before a world quietly suspended in time.

While the composition feels sparce at first glance, deeper observation reveals Hoshi’s complex layering of color, texture, and geometry. The tree’s knotted limbs suggest ancient endurance, while the glittering starfield above adds a mystical, almost meditative quality. The work carries strong affinities with the Japanese aesthetic of yūgen—a subtle profundity, a beauty hinted at rather than declared.

Printed with silver and bronze mica highlights, the blue background is overprinted on silver leaf and a fine layer of silver mica has been applied over the blue. The complexity of this overprinting creates depth and provides a mysterious source of light that is held deep within the design. This print is simply breathtaking in person!