"It is with great pleasure that I announce the release of this new woodblock print, the tenth in its series and my 190th Japanese print design. The design is now available from Scholten Japanese Art on pre-order, and will begin to be distributed in a few days and throughout December. My lovely model Erica M. danced around my studio with a feather fan for quite some time until I got the exact pose and hair movement I wanted for this: many thanks to her! This is my first Bijin-ga (picture of a beauty) for some years as I hadn’t found the right model, but I believe Erica was perfect for this image of the heady days of Japan’s economic boom, at its height in 1990, which collapsed some years later. This Bubble Era saw vast fortunes being made on property speculation and an economy on overdrive, so I set this print in a nightclub, perhaps the infamous Juliana’s Tokyo, where overpriced drinks were downed by expense-account execs. This young lady has the highly fashionable ‘chapatsu’ or brown dyed hair of that time, a red satin dress with silver embroidery and gold jewellery, and the de rigueur accessory, a feather fan, to dance with. Like all the prints in this series, there is silver and bronze metallic pigment, deep embossing and 23 carat gold leaf employed on this piece, as well as 37 colors printed, including overprinting the deep black of the background three times to give a velvety depth." Paul Binnie, November 2023
