The drawings in this series were part of a group of one hundred works that Keiji Usami began producing in 1978 and later presented in the exhibition Keiji Usami: 100 Drawings, held at Nanten Gallery in 1980.While the human figure motif remains consistent with his earlier work, here the figures are enclosed within circular forms and defined through points of contact and connection. For the exhibition catalogue, Usami wrote a fifty-line text entitled “100 Drawings Part 1,” and words or phrases taken from each line were used as the titles of fifty individual works.
The title of this work is derived from the thirty-fourth line of the text: “Once, four figures stood on the pavement of a city shimmering with gun smoke.”The phrase “four figures” refers to a group of four human forms that Usami discovered in a press photograph of the 1965 Watts uprising in Los Angeles and subsequently incorporated into his work.