Onbu (Piggyback)

STIK’s Onbu (Piggyback), 2013, reincarnates a celebrated Japanese tale in inky black and grey. The subject of his painting is Yaji and Kita, a comical duo invented by Hiroshige, the 19th century master known for Ukiyo-e woodblock prints which later inspired artists such as Claude Monet, Édouard Manet, and Vincent van Gogh. In his celebrated series The Fifty-Three Stations of the Tōkaidō, Yagi and Kita travel the road between Kyoto and the shōgun's capital Edo. STIK’s inspiration for Onbu (Piggyback) came from a scene in which the duo tricks a blind man into carrying them across a river. Ultimately, they are caught and then dropped unceremoniously into the water. In STIK’s re-examination, rendered in his characteristically simplistic style, one man clutches the back of another. Onbu (Piggyback) is the original master for a series of woodblock prints on rice paper created in 2013 with the Adachi Institute Tokyo; these were produced by hand in four colours, each in an edition of twenty-five plus ten artist’s proofs. For STIK, Onbu (Piggyback) is part of a larger investigation into classical artworks, their iconography,  and the way the past may be reinterpreted to speak to the contemporary world.