Asumi Hayashi

Asumi Hayashi (born 1985, Tokyo) is a Japanese printmaker who works almost exclusively in mezzotint — the labour-intensive intaglio technique that produces deep, velvety blacks by methodically rocking a toothed instrument across an entire copper plate before scraping back to lighter values. Her mature practice uses the technique to render moments of slow consciousness: a single bouquet hanging in night air, a hand entering a sunlit room, the surface of water absorbing light. The prints are quiet, dim, and slow to read.

Hayashi was educated at Musashino Art University in Tokyo, where she completed a B.A. in Fine Arts (Painting and Printmaking) between 2004 and 2009 and an M.A. in Fine Arts (Printmaking) between 2009 and 2011. After graduate school she settled in Aichi Prefecture, where she continues to maintain her studio while pursuing an unusually international residency programme. She has held artist-in-residence positions at Kunstnarhuset Messen in Ålvik, Norway (2017), Mustarinda in Hyrynsalmi, Finland (2018), and Dar Sidi Slimane in Casablanca, Morocco (2019) — three back-to-back northern, sub-arctic, and North African residencies that have shaped her approach to light and to the slow ambient atmospheres her mezzotints describe.

Her technical commitment to mezzotint is a deliberate choice rather than a default. In her own words, she works in mezzotint because 'the deep tone made by this technique can express a strong presence' — a remark consistent with the way her prints favour matt black expanses against which a small motif emerges. She sometimes extends the medium with chine-collé, in which a thin sheet of dyed or printed paper is bonded to the heavier substrate during printing, introducing a quiet colour or pattern into the otherwise monochromatic field.

Her subject vocabulary is small and consistent. Bouquets, single flowers, hands, drops of water, and small night interiors recur across her editions, which treat the moment when ordinary domestic activity slows enough for the printed image to register as a meditative still life. The editions are small and the sheet sizes modest, which suits the time-intensive plate preparation and emphasises that the work is intended to be encountered close-up.

Hayashi's solo exhibitions have been concentrated in Tokyo — among them Crystal–Raindrops–Starlight (Gallery face to face, Tokyo, 2019) and Water Goes to Deep, Sounds of Silent (Gallery Café 3, Tokyo, 2018). She has also been featured in group exhibitions across Belgium, Russia, and Sweden, including A New Wave of Japanese Printmaking in Antwerp and the 5th International Mezzotint Festival in Ekaterinburg, Russia (2019).

Her prints are held by the Machida City Museum of Graphic Arts in Tokyo (a leading Japanese museum dedicated to printmaking), the Shanghai Peninsula Art Museum in China, and the Hambis Printmaking Museum in Cyprus. In the United States she is represented in Seattle by Gallery No.85, the contemporary-prints gallery that continues the legacy of Davidson Galleries, and her work is also presented through Wondering Mind. Her wider profile sits at the increasingly active intersection of Japanese mezzotint and the international mezzotint circuit, through which her work has reached collectors and institutions well beyond the Japanese print scene.