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 entirely 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 relocated to Aichi Prefecture, where she has continued 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 has stated that she works in mezzotint because the deep tone made by the technique can express a strong presence — a remark consistent with the way her prints favour matt black expanses against which a small motif emerges. Recent works extend the medium with chine-collé, in which a thin sheet of dyed or printed paper is bonded to the heavier substrate during printing; Dream of One Day (2014) and One Night (2014) and To The Warm Darkness (2016) all combine mezzotint with chine-collé to introduce a quiet color or pattern into the otherwise monochromatic field.

Her subject vocabulary is small and consistent. Bouquets, single flowers, hands, drops of water, small night interiors, and abstract phosphenes recur across her editions. Several recent prints (Breath; A Bouquet in the Night; In the Sun, 2020) treat the moment when ordinary domestic activity slows enough for the printed image to register as a meditative still life. The editions are generally small — 5 to 30 — and the sheet sizes are modest, which suits the time-intensive plate preparation and emphasizes that the work is intended to be encountered close-up.

Hayashi's solo exhibition record since 2017 has been concentrated in Tokyo, with overseas appearances connected to her residency cycle: Crystal–Raindrops–Starlight (2019); Water Goes to Deep, Sounds of Silent (2018); and a series of smaller solo presentations in Aichi and Tokyo galleries. She has also been featured in group exhibitions in Belgium, Russia, Sweden, and Cyprus, including A New Wave of Japanese Printmaking and the 5th International Mezzotint Festival in 2019.