Akira Kurosaki

Akira Kurosaki (黒崎彰, 1937–2019) was one of the most distinctive figures in Japan's postwar creative-print (sōsaku-hanga) and modern mokuhanga movement. He was born on 10 January 1937 in Dalian (Dairen), in Japanese-occupied Manchuria; after the Second World War his family returned to Japan. In 1956 he entered the Kyoto Institute of Technology, where he studied in the Department of Design and took his degree in 1962. He developed an interest in ukiyo-e prints and their techniques while at college and began producing woodblock prints in 1965, work that from the outset explored the tension between Japanese aesthetic restraint and a Western modernist impulse toward abstraction.

Kurosaki developed a highly personal visual vocabulary that ranged from semi-abstract and surreal imagery to bold, hard-edged geometric forms — rectangles, arcs, and intersecting planes — printed in saturated, sometimes almost fluorescent color. His prints deployed precise color fields built up through many successive printing passes, and the results vibrated with optical intensity, the pigments seeming to glow against one another in ways that recalled stained glass or Color Field painting, yet the visible grain of the woodblock and the deliberate registration of each layer remained unmistakably rooted in mokuhanga technique.

Through the 1960s and 1970s Kurosaki exhibited at the major international print biennials that served as proving grounds for contemporary printmaking, among them Tokyo, Ljubljana, Kraków, Maastricht, and Paris. Early recognition came with the Kokugakai Association's Newcomer Award in 1967, and he went on to win prizes at the Tokyo International Print Biennial and the Kraków International Print Biennial, among other honors. These competitions brought his work to Western collectors and curators who recognized in it a synthesis of Japanese craft and postwar abstraction.

Kurosaki was also a dedicated educator and writer on printmaking. In 1987 he became a professor at Kyoto Seika University, where he headed the printmaking program and established a department of papermaking, mentoring a generation of younger printmakers before attaining emeritus status in 2008. He authored a number of books on woodblock printing, and his study of traditional Japanese printmaking techniques informed his own practice and helped frame mokuhanga as a living tradition rather than a historical curiosity.

Across his career Kurosaki moved fluidly between abstraction and figuration and between the woodblock and other print media, including silkscreen and lithography, and he remained active as a printmaker into his final years; he died in 2019 at the age of eighty-two. His works are held in major public collections, including the British Museum, the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo, among many others.