Baren Work series

Between around 1965 and 1975, while working simultaneously in abstract painting and woodblock printing, Hajime Van began to move away from the traditional process of carving woodblocks. Instead, he turned to the baren—the tool normally used to transfer ink from a woodblock onto paper—as a means of expression in itself.

Rubbing, pressing, drawing circles: each movement left a different trace, shaped by pressure, speed, direction, and even the rhythm of the artist’s breathing. Van transformed the act of “printing” into an act of “drawing” with the baren, directly recording the movement of his body on paper. He called this approach “Baren Work: Stroke.”

What Van sought was to capture lines and colors that could exist only in that particular moment.

In 1977, this exploration developed into “Baren Work: Stripe.”

Van finely carved the woodblock into linear patterns, printed them onto washi, and then rolled, wove, and assembled the printed paper itself. In this process, paper was no longer simply a flat support receiving ink. It became thread, structure, and ultimately an independent material that formed the work itself.

This was made possible by Yame washi specially produced for Van by Mr. Takayama—a paper combining exceptional strength with remarkable delicacy.

In “Stroke,” Van transferred the physical act of printing—the movement of his body—onto washi. In “Stripe,” he went further, transforming the paper being printed into the very structure of the artwork.

Together, these two approaches define Hajime Van’s “Baren Work.”