Zugzwang
Zugzwang is a series of prints made in Japan on traditional paper, produced through an extended period of study and immersion in Japanese drawing and printmaking techniques. The title borrows from chess: the position in which a player is compelled to make one precise, unavoidable move.
The work reflects a period of deliberate exposure to a visual and philosophical culture that operates by different principles. In Japanese aesthetics, beauty resists the expected; silence and shadow are active elements; and the print is less a transcription of reality than its capture and imprint. Obegi submitted her practice to those conditions, and the figures that emerge carry the result: Japanese in feature and bearing, they return the Western viewer's gaze with a composure that quietly reverses the position of the observer.
The series is accompanied by a critical text by Margaux Bonopera, which frames the work in relation to haiku as a form:
“concentrated,
sensation-driven,
and open to the uproar of the living.”
