AINU STORIES. Japanese printmaker Takahiko Hayashi created a series of nine woodblock prints based on descriptions of the Ainu people’s natural world. Works including "Voice Like a Bow Wrapped in Cherry Bark," a woodblock print (pictured above), and "Resounding Jasper Winds," an intaglio print (on page one), are on display at the Froelick Gallery through April 18. (Photo courtesy of the Froelick Gallery)

From The Asian Reporter, V19, #13 (March 31, 2009), page 11.

By Allison Rupp

Like moon rocks housing tiny universes, the forms of Japanese printmaker Takahiko Hayashi’s latest engravings come alive with organic shapes and swirls captured in miniature. "Ainu Stories," on display at the Froelick Gallery in downtown Portland, draws on vivid descriptions of the northern Japanese Ainu people, whose animist traditions and relationship with their land were first recorded in the book Collected Songs of the Ainu Gods in 1922.

"In the olden days, this wide-open island of Hokkaido was the free land of our ancestors," author Chiri Yukie opens the book. "Living like innocent children in the embrace of the beautiful outdoors, they were truly the beloved children of Mother Nature."

Yukie’s descriptions of the Hokkaido landscape, along with the translations of Ainu poems and legends, inspired Hayashi, who lives in Tokyo, to capture the spirit of the Ainu in wood engravings from the trunk of Hokkaido’s indigenous boxwood tree. Over the course of three years, the printmaker taught himself the process of engraving without using modern mechanical or chemical processes.

"Ainu Stories" consists of nine prints, each less than a foot tall. The white, negative space created in the wood by Hayashi’s engraving technique pops next to the dark ink transferred from the wood’s flat surfaces.

"I try to create something from nothing. I try to capture negative to represent positive. I try to express the present with history, and east with west. It is when objects exist that nothingness can be recognized for the first time," Hayashi once said.

Many of Hayashi’s favorite shapes, such as swirling nautilus shells and cobwebby lines, appear within the prints. The artist uses the spiral repeatedly in his works because of its significance to animist peoples like the Ainu or Native Americans, as well as the fact that "it’s fun to draw," says Rebecca Rockom, assistant director at Froelick Gallery.

The titles of the prints evoke the language of Ainu poetry with lines such as "A Silver Wind, a Pure Wind Came Blowing" or "Voice Like a Bow Wrapped in Cherry Bark."

Whether Hayashi is making prints from wood engravings or metal etchings, his work consistently impresses patrons of the gallery with its delicacy, invoking the fineness of nature in grass, wind, or feathers.

"One of the exceptional things about his work is the amount of detail he’s able to achieve with this process," says Rockom.

Hayashi’s larger, brightly colored etchings can also be found at the gallery, where his work has appeared regularly since 2003. The prints join ink and paper in vivid, complementary combinations such as aquamarine and indigo blue, or red and navy.

After more than 100 years of forced assimilation into Japanese society, it is unknown how many Ainu survive today. Although the Japanese government officially recognized the Ainu as an indigenous people in 2008, the damage done to their land and culture is irreversible — not a single authentic Ainu village remains.

"The many beautiful expressions they handed down, will they all be lost without a fight, along with the weak people who are now dying out?" asked the author of Collected Songs of the Ainu Gods nearly 100 years ago.

Luckily, with Hayashi’s work the fight for preservation and interpretation of the Ainu tradition has not been lost.

"Ainu Stories" is on display through April 18 at the Froelick Gallery, located at 714 N.W. Davis Street in Portland. The gallery is open from 10:30am to 5:30pm Tuesday through Saturday, or by appointment. To learn more, call (503) 222-1142 or visit <www.froelickgallery.com>.