meta-landscapes

Yuko Suzuki

This work began with the idea that the process of separating colors in traditional landscape woodblock prints could be translated into code. As a woodblock printmaker, I experience the world through what I call “printmaking thinking”: a perspective grounded in coexistence—carving (stillness) and printing (movement), board (hard) and paper (soft), block and print. One block gives birth to many prints, like cellular division. Color layers reflect the stratification of human presence and time. As I imagined the physical gestures of separating and layering colors, and handling paper, I translated them into code. This gave rise to animated variations.

What began as a technical experiment evolved into an exploration of a “conceptual three-dimensional print.” I realized that even without a physical object, the structure, logic, and philosophy of printmaking could be transformed into another kind of presence. This animation assembles around 30 deconstruction patterns applied to photographs taken in Shibuya, Tokyo—a dense urban site of layered flows. Pixels behave like living organisms, shifting and reorganizing like cells.

The resulting images evoke landscapes that feel both microscopic and macroscopic. In this work, coding becomes an extension of the hand and mind. Printmaking becomes a lens for reimagining contemporary image-making. The use of landscape imagery also pays homage to shin-hanga, a Japanese print movement from the early 20th century that followed in the tradition of ukiyo-e, merging classical techniques with modern sensibilities. I hold deep respect for this tradition, which continues to shape how I see and work through printmaking.

Project Collaborators:

THE blank GALLERY (Tokyo) – exhibition partner and host of the original solo show where the work was presented