Illuminate: Woodcuts

Printmaking connects the past and the future. Yuasa says, “Once we have lost something, we sometimes can’t remember what we have lost. It is easy to lose something vital in a moment. Last year, I visited a small town in the northeast of Japan which had suffered from the earthquake and tsunami in 2011. In this long sweep of razed, flat land, I couldn’t imagine there had even been a town in which people had lived. Also, it is very difficult to keep a feeling we have after a catastrophe. We have the gift of forgetting pain when it ends. We can’t keep everything in our minds, but we have things we have to remember. I make woodcut prints to hold memory, and it is my way of understanding and immortalizing everyday events as well as cataclysmic events. The memory and the materials are both present in a stratum of a print. A fragment of memory is very fragile, but in each woodblock print there is a clue for the future.”