I often think about the essence, or charm, of print art.

Speaking in an aesthetic sense alone, not technical senses such as transfer or reproduction of printed images, it will simply be attributed to the effect of printing. I remember that as a raw assistant curator of an art museum, I had a private chance to visit a studio of the late printmaker Hodaka Yoshida to buy his new print at my expense. He then recommended a piece to me, saying "How would you like this?" But I asked him to exchange the piece with another, saying "This is better than that in printing condition."

Now, even thinking back to the day makes me feel ashamed, which, though, should be blamed on my youth. But I still don't deny that at that moment I thought I wanted to buy the better one in printing condition if I was to pay money anyway.

Apart from such kind of joy to observe the subtle difference between printing conditions of an edition, we have a more important thing about the effect or printing: an effect that any prominent skill of any confident artist cannot attain, or an effect unattainable without a printing process that somehow could contain the accidental. It is remembered that Nagai Kafu (l87 9-l959), a Japanese novelist of rarely refined taste, read the charm or secret of ukiyo-e print just in the printing process, against the trend of his time; ukiyo-e paintings were much more favored among people.

By the way, what is the act of printing? It would mean giving pressure to the sheet and plate, whether using a press machine or by hand, through which the plate as negative will be reborn as an image-impressed sheet as positive. Anyway, what is important is that both the sheet and plate are pressed. It is widely known that coming back from his 1st stay in Tahiti in 1893, Gauguin planned to publish his travel notes called "Noa Noa," and printed 10 woodcuts for its illustrations in a very primitive manner, like placing plates and sheets under his own body or under his bed. It seems that the pressure must be insufficient for printing. But it is obvious how artistic the printing condition was, or how enlightening it was for the woodcut renaissance at the end of the 19th century, when compared to that of the so-called Pola Edition, an edition printed after Gauguin's death by his son Pola with a press machine that could exert sufficient pressure.

Let me think more about the act of printing itself, by posing a question such as "Actually, what is the thing printed there?" Is it merely an image embodying what is charged on the plate? No, there must be something more. Of course, I know we never reach an exact answer for this. But let me suppose, though with a slight reservation, like this: I wonder if what is truly printed there, or what appears from the plate as a medium, is nobody else but the artist who lives in his or her age, society, history, and tradition. What finally can emerge through an extremely unpredictable act of printing would be, as it were, "the world" itself.

"The world" is naturally very hard to deal with: a great mystery. This impression becomes deeper and deeper, as I watch a most ambiguous grand-prix piece. Motivated by a sundial, Bulgarian artist Kolibarov made this piece, in which a naked man leans at the window and looks up at the starry sky. The man is just like a longer clock hand, and yet stands in a dangerous posture on the red sphere. The structure with profound reality reflects the complicated and mysterious situation, somewhat mixed with feelings of hope and despair, of the East European countries. I think that nothing can tell the diversity and seriousness of "the world" charged in this piece more than the fact that its true worth gradually stood out among as many as 3,600 entries over the screening stages in several times. Such a special grand-prix piece aside, I only sense substantially high quality in any of pieces severely selected by the jury members. I confidently conclude that this remarkable result was brought about by the cruel but unavoidable subscribed rules particular to the "mini-print." I believe that this Mini-Print Triennial has certainly presented the best chance to give new consideration to the proposition of what is a proper size for print, especially for today's Japanese print artists who tend to be "contemporary artists" and, as a result, become large piece-oriented insignificantly and recklessly.

In closing, let me make some brief comments on other works that were impressed on my mind: the entry by Kim Sook-Jung, with an effect characteristic to etching, features acute and complicated expression of the face, likely making an accusation against something; Novakova Moneva Neri employs a symbolic composition that seems to grope for the passage to hope in this age of depression; Kyoko Sakamoto conveys warm feelings of woodcut through its serene image of still life; and both pieces by Janne Laine and Tomomi Ono possess rarely sensitive images against the margins.

It was a slight surprise to me that abstract expression was not so frequently found in the entries. It probably could not be helped, if you think of the world's current situation in which we have no choice but to face up to the complex and harsh reality. Speaking from this viewpoint, Reishi Kusaka and Yasuyuki Ueda should make sincere endeavor even more to discover or extract the meanings, or, I dare say, existent meanings that should be inherent in abstract images. That's because print art is nothing else but the compression of "the world," and its inherent smallness is an epitome of the universe.

Picasso's Guernica is always an anti-war painting, where as Japanese paintings made during the war to whip up fighting spirit or the antiwar series works The Hiroshima Panels made after the war can create something different from what artists intended according to times or stances, so that they sometimes need to be explained.

Probably because the new millennium, as it were, started with the terrorist attack in New York, I so often found realistic images of the tragedy in entries. Art is not a mere reportage or report; it requires something more than a fact-based message. There were certainly some pieces of such kind that interested me, but they all failed to sublimate those images into art. I understand that more time must be needed for sublimation. But I cannot help but conclude that such a trend reflects the time in which artists from world's powers lack artistic imagination.

I am sure that the mini-prints submitted to the 3rd Triennial have shown that art, which differs according to each country, concludes to unique nature. As Shuichi Kato wrote:

There still remains in the realm of art the possibility to transform essentially unerasable "nationalism" into creativity.

It was Polish or Korean artists, not American or Japanese, who impressed their potentially unerasable temperaments onto the plate. Also often found were entries with a variety of traditions historically acquired in the course of time of each country. Japanese artists, as I expected, successfully developed the decorative ideas by employing various print techniques, presenting something that I could enjoy seeing.

I thought that, as a whole, there existed a dynamism, in which artists started from their own singularities, tried to overcome them, and finally arrived at an aesthetic universality. I am sure that this Triennial with such quality became an event worth to see. It is just art I think as ideal. I somehow could believe that Japan was the right place to organize this exhibition.

The total number of entry pieces, 3,645, seems to indicate that entrants are composed of print-proper artists, younger artists, and not a few artists specializing in other genres. The substantial level of entries was high as a whole, but the award selection work did not go smooth. Personally, I think that we jurors surely have an eye for a piece from a viewpoint of perfectibility based on technical expression. But the works that actually attracted and interested me during examination were excellent pieces in no relation to the category of being technically bad or better. I think that what matters in art, as in man's thought, is the unconscious much more than the conscious. As Japanese oil painter Morikazu Kumagai wrote in his famous book, Heta Mo E No Uchi, which means that a bungle itself in an artwork could become charm later. As a juror, I strongly hoped to select such entries that were a bungle to the extremity, but, at the same time, were provided with high aesthetic beauty.

The entry screening work followed the tragedy like the end of civilization, which, as a result, seemed to have conditioned that we selected pieces possessing personality rather than character, aesthetic rather than everyday reality, and emotional joy rather than intellectual joy. We wanted works of super sensibility, not of Common sensibility or insanity. It was lucky that some of the award pieces had such a magical power of print art.