Asai Kiyoshi

Asai Kiyoshi (朝井清, also written 淺井淸, 1902-1968) was a Japanese painter and woodblock printmaker born in Hiroshima prefecture, active in the first half of the twentieth century within the overlapping orbits of the Bunten-Teiten salon system and the early sōsaku-hanga (creative print) movement. He occupies a comparatively quiet position in the institutional literature on Japanese printmaking, but his name appears with sufficient regularity in exhibition records, dealer catalogues, and at least one important documentary photograph to place him among the working hanga artists of pre-war and immediate post-war Japan.

His training followed the conventional Tokyo art-world pathway of his generation. He is recorded as having studied under two well-established painters of the late Meiji and Taishō period: Saitō Yori (1885-1959), a Western-style oil painter who had returned from study in Europe and become an important teacher of yōga (Western-style painting), and Nakazawa Hiromitsu (1874-1964), a yōga painter and printmaker who taught at the Tokyo School of Fine Arts and produced widely circulated illustrated books. The combination of teachers gave Asai a foundation in both academic Western drawing and the broader currents of Taishō-era graphic art, including the emerging interest in woodblock as an artist-driven rather than publisher-driven medium.

Following his training, Asai Kiyoshi exhibited widely at the major government and society salons of the period. He showed at the Bunten and Teiten (the Ministry of Education's Fine Art Exhibition, and its renamed successor from 1919 onward) and at the Tōkōkai, an exhibition society associated with the academic yōga circle. From 1929 he began showing woodblock prints with the Nihon Sōsaku-Hanga Kyōkai (Japan Creative Print Association), the group founded in 1918 by Yamamoto Kanae, Onchi Kōshirō, and others to advocate the jiga-jikoku-jizuri ('self-drawn, self-carved, self-printed') principle that defined the sōsaku-hanga movement. He later exhibited with the Nihon Hanga Kyōkai (Japan Print Association), the broader successor organisation that brought together creative-print artists across Japan from the 1930s onward.

This exhibition trajectory places Asai Kiyoshi in a distinctive category among interwar Japanese artists: a salon painter and academic exhibitor who also chose to participate in the more avant-garde, anti-publisher creative print movement. The combination was not unique to him — a number of yōga-trained artists, including some of Nakazawa Hiromitsu's circle, similarly worked across both paths — but it does mean his prints sit on the seam between the official exhibition system and the sōsaku-hanga workshop tradition. His subjects included bijin-ga (beautiful women) compositions in the manner that connected late shin-hanga to the modern moga (modern girl) imagery of the early Shōwa period — a large black-and-white woodblock Nude in Onsen, de-accessioned from the Nerima Art Museum, Tokyo, is a representative example — alongside more architectural, documentary subjects of which his Atomic Bomb Ruins (Hiroshima) print is the most historically significant.