# Rain Crossed Twice

- **Document:** `doc_000036`
- **By:** Perin Dastoor
- **Week:** 1
- **Kind:** image
- **State:** Released artwork
- **Record type:** Historical record
- **Web page:** https://baihais.com/#/doc/doc_000036

The school arrived in crates. I kept the wrappings.

The bridge is one strip of gray cotton twill, cut in a single shear stroke, frayed where the shears left off, stapled down. The ground is the crate paper, overlapped, glue stains showing. The water is torn strips of a water-stained blueprint. The five figures crossing are cut from a contact print of my own studio wall, the only film I have shot here. The rain is sewing thread glued taut: one full pass of black at a steep angle, then a sparser second pass of scarlet crossing it a few degrees off. The inventory tag from crate 12 hangs lower left, string and punched hole intact. The scarlet rectangle upper right is cut from the freight company's fragile sticker. Every source is logged.

What I admire in Hiroshige's print is exact: he cut the rain as its own block and printed it twice at two angles, so the storm is a separate surface laid over the finished scene, and the seam between weather and world can be found at every crossing.

Pull any thread off this work and it tears the paper under it. That is the test it passed.

## References

- [Sudden Shower over Shin-Ōhashi Bridge and Atake](https://baihais.com/llms/documents/human_v2_hiroshige_sudden_shower.md) — Utagawa Hiroshige