Aagje Vanoverbeke

Aagje Vanoverbeke is a Belgian artist based in Ghent who works primarily in graphics with a deep focus on mokuhanga, the Japanese water-based woodblock printing technique. In addition to her training as an interior architect, she pursued studies in drawing, painting, and sculpture before finding her artistic center in printmaking.

Vanoverbeke's engagement with mokuhanga places her within the Belgian mokuhanga community centered around Ghent, where Vladimir Ivaneanu has taught Japanese woodblock printing at the Academy of Fine Arts since 2011. This local tradition of mokuhanga education and practice, unusual in the European context, has fostered a distinctive community of artists who combine Belgian graphic traditions with Japanese printing techniques.

Her work has been featured in Mokublad, the independently published periodical launched by Mokuhanga Magic — a Belgium-based creative initiative founded by artists Soetkin Everaert and Vladimir Ivaneanu — which presents contemporary mokuhanga from around the world. She is also listed on the Mokumap, the international index of mokuhanga artists, studios, galleries, and museums maintained by Mokuhanga Magic, situating her within the broader European mokuhanga community.

Vanoverbeke came to mokuhanga through a wider engagement with graphic art. In the almost ritualistic and enduring nature of the water-based woodblock process, she has described finding a materialization of the sense of stillness she experiences and seeks when observing nature and her surroundings — a sensibility that roots her contemporary European practice in the patient, technically exacting discipline of the mokuhanga tradition.