Get to know the artist's featured in Hanga Ten at Watts: Japanese printmaking today, on display in the Watts Contemporary Gallery until 1 September.

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Katsunori Hamanishi

Katsunori Hamanishi is a master of mezzotint print-making, the most demanding of printing techniques, and is considered to be the foremost artist in this field internationally. While mezzotint printing was invented by a German in 17th-century Europe, it was a Japanese artist - Yozo Hamaguchi (1909-2000) - who developed a technique for colour mezzotint. Hamanishi has enhanced this technique further with his own distinctive set of colours and styles. Some of his images are starkly abstract, but his more recent works evoke traditional Japanese images of nature, architecture and the kimono. His subjects - whether aspects of nature or architecture – look like 3D forms on paper. These are not produced from photographs: each image has been painstakingly burnished on the plate.

Hamanishi was born in Hokkaido, the most northern island of Japan in 1949. He graduated from Tokai University in 1973 and now lives in Kanagawa Prefecture. In 1986 he was visiting artist at the Cleveland Institute of Art in USA, and in 1987 a grant from the Japanese Government’s Cultural Affairs Agency enabled him to spend a year studying at the University of Pennsylvania. He subsequently became visiting professor at the University of Alberta. During this time in Canada, Hamanishi began to introduce colour to his work and moved towards more abstract prints. More recently, he has added metal plates or gold or silver leaf to his compositions, bringing a bright touch to his interesting images and lifting the sombre mood of a typical mezzotint.

Hamanishi has been awarded several prestigious prizes. He had a solo exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago in 2013 and his work is included in many museum collections around the world, including: Metropolitan Museum of Art and MOMA in New York, The Library of Congress in Washinton, Krakow National Museum, Osaka National Museum of Art, and The British Museum.

Juliane Yamada

Juliane Yamada was born in the 1940s in Springfield, Illinois. At the age of 16 she won an art competition and a scholarship to art college. She completed her Bachelor of Arts degree as well as graduate work at the University of Arkansas. In 1970 she held her first exhibition and began teaching at Revard Junior College, Florida.

A move to Tokyo had a dramatic effect on both Yamada’s professional and personal life. For six years she worked as a graphic artist for Obata Studios and as a model for Seiko Watches. She studied under the Japanese illustrator, printmaker and graphic designer Tsuyoshi Yayanagi.

After her marriage to Tetsuo Yamada, a Japanese citizen, she moved to St. Vincent where she painted and drew studies of life in the West Indies. In the 1970s Yamada and her family moved to Europe and began to specialise in portraits of children, many of which were commissioned. Some of these were selected for the United Nations Exhibition, “Children of the World” and added to the United Nations permanent collection. Yamada also completed a number of portraits of well-known Asian performers. Among them are the Japanese actor Ryo Tamura and the revered kabuki (traditional Japanese theatre) legend Ichikawa Ennosuke III.

Yamada’s works mainly consist of watercolours and pencil drawings, which excel in their exquisite detail and rich textures. Some of her portraits are limited edition lithographs, often printed on hand-made rice paper. The images are painstakingly layered onto the paper, making sure that the subtilities of sumi (Japanese ink) paintings or pencil drawings are perfectly preserved. Yamada sadly died in 2020.

Nana Shiomi

Nana Shiomi (b. 1956) started painting in oils at the age of fourteen, and soon developed an interest in contemporary art. She studied at Tama Art University, Tokyo from 1975 to 1981, and then at the Royal College of Art in London (1989-1991). She has had several solo exhibitions, mainly in Japan and the United Kingdom and has been selected for the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition for over ten years. She has works

in the permanent collections of the British Museum, V&A, The Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, and The Tama Art University Museum, Tokyo.

Nana’s interest in printmaking developed at the age of twenty. She chose the traditional Japanese woodcut technique – using the “baren” to spread the water-based ink and let it soak into the Japanese paper – and this has been integral in determining her style. She is fascinated by the fact that the plate and the print are always opposite configurations and she has found dualistic principles everywhere. It is no coincidence that most of her work is composed of two opposing sides.

Over the last few years, Nana Shiomi has completed a project of one hundred prints called “Mitate”, selecting one hundred elements she considers to be closely intertwined with Japanese culture. “Mitate” refers to a process of thought that Japanese culture has enjoyed since ancient times, to do with metaphors and parodies, a form of comparing one thing with another. Her objective is to have the viewer give the chosen elements a new meaning by creating his own combinations and associations, thus giving new life and new meanings to worn-out and antiquated symbols of Japanese culture.

Some of Nana Shiomi’s recent prints show the influence of Hokusai (b. 1760), whom she considers a great thinker. She sees Hokusai’s message to be a celebration of human existence, and her prints “Hokusai’s Wave (Left) – Happy Dog” and “Hokusai’s Wave (Right) – Happy Carp” are about the vortex and strength of living things.

Hiromitsu Takahashi

Hiromitsu Takahashi was born in Kanagawa Prefecture in 1959 and graduated from Nihon University, Tokyo. He came from an artistic family, his father being a print artist and his mother a textile dye artist. Both his parents were assistants to the stencil print masters, Mori Yoshitoshi (1898 - 1992) who specialised in “kappa-zuri” stencil, and Serizawa Keisuke (1895-1984) who mostly specialised in textile stencil dying and was designated a National Living Treasure.

The influence of his parents and the two great stencil masters paved Hiromitsu’s way for a career in kappa-zuri stencil making. He is among a handful of living artists in Japan who have mastered the technique, and is today the principal artist in this field.

While Hiromitsu learnt from and was influenced by Mori Yoshitoshi, he has developed his own distinctive style. Mori depicted people from all walks of life from samurai to villagers, farmers and craftsmen in their daily environment. In contrast Hiromitsu chose to concentrate on characters from Japanese kabuki theatre, a traditional form of theatre originating in the 17th Century. Kabuki theatre images were a favourite of some of the ukiyo-e artists, and Hiromitsu can be seen to be the modern kabuki artist utilising the very difficult kappa-zuri stencil printmaking technique, a centuries’ old craft. Kappa-zuri involves utilising several layers of feather-like paper bonded together with lacquer and moisture-proof tannin. (“Kappa” means binding feather together, and “zuri” means to print).

Hiromitsu’s images are composed of the bright distinctive colours of kabuki costumes and actors’ make-up. As the printing process is most difficult, Hiromitsu’s editions are usually very small, fewer than 15. The artist signs his name with his given name “Hiromitsu”, rather than his family name Takahashi. Hiromitsu’s works are in the permanent collections of the Museum of Fine Arts Boston; Gallery of New South Wales, Australia; Tikotin Museum of Japanese Art, Israel; Ashmolean Museum, Oxford; The Library of Congress, Washington DC among others.

Hideo Takeda

Hideo Takeda was born in Osaka in 1948, and still lives there. He studied sculpture at Tama University, but has always regarded himself primarily as a cartoonist. At first sight his cartoons seem international and urban, with little to identify them as specifically Japanese. But in fact their brevity of line owes a great deal to Japan’s tradition of haiga (brush and ink drawings to accompany haiku poems).

The “Genpei” series of screenprints, started in 1985, is generally considered to be Takeda’s masterpiece. In it he follows the example of his 19th century predecessors in recording the harrowing events of the great civil wars of the 12th century. Warriors fought their noble masters and took control of the land, but then split into two factions, rallying around the Taira (red flag) and Minamoto (while flag) clans. This brutal war has become a major source of Japanese folklore and legend.

At first sight, the battle scenes of the “Genpei” series consist of most beautiful images, often with a gold background which is sometimes patterned like the material used to mount traditional scrolls. A closer look, however, reveals an implied commentary on the concealed brutality of contemporary life – corrupt, mad for power, its energy and violence derived from a frantic sexuality.

Takeda’s other screenprints cover a wide range of subject matter, ranging from the skeletal structures of birds and animals in black and white, to a series featuring the complex tattoos used by the Japanese gangster class. His cartoons continue to depict the humour, cruelty and sheer absurdity of contemporary urban life.

Takeda is well recognised internationally and has had many solo shows, most notably a major exhibition at the British Museum in 1993. Several books have been published about his cartoons and series of prints. His works are featured in major collections including the British Museum and the British Library.