Yoshihide Fukumoto

Yoshihide Fukumoto (born 1954, Hyōgo Prefecture) is a Japanese silkscreen printmaker based in the Azumino region of Nagano Prefecture. His selection for the 68th CWAJ Print Show in 2025 — with the silkscreen 'Ablaze with autumn leaves, Mt. Jonen is now crowned with snow' — places him within the established cohort of senior Japanese silkscreen artists working in the long tradition of the Japanese mountain landscape print.

Fukumoto trained in printmaking at the Osaka School of Design and Fine Art (Ōsaka Zōkei Bijutsu Gakkō). For roughly a decade he worked as a printmaker in Osaka, sharing a print workshop with friends, before he and his wife — both natives of Hyōgo — relocated to Matsukawa Village in the Azumino region of Nagano. There, set among the rice fields beneath the Northern Alps, they established the SKY silkscreen print workshop, where he has produced prints and printed textiles ever since. The move to the mountains reshaped his subject matter, as the peaks, seasons, and rural scenery of Azumino became his central motifs.

The CWAJ print depicts Mount Jonen (常念岳), a 2,857-metre peak in the Northern Japanese Alps that rises above the Azumino basin and is one of the most recognisable mountains of central Japan. The title — 'Ablaze with autumn leaves, Mt. Jonen is now crowned with snow' — evokes the late-autumn moment when the lower slopes still hold their full kōyō (autumn-leaf) colour while the summit has taken its first snowfall, the seasonal signature of the high central Alps in late October and early November.

Silkscreen is one of the principal contemporary Japanese print media, capable of the dense, saturated, and precisely registered colour planes characteristic of Fukumoto's mountain landscapes. The technique's flat-colour graphic register reads as a deliberate stylisation of the elevational layering of forested slopes, exposed rock, and snow — well suited to the Northern Alps subjects, especially Mount Jonen and the neighbouring Ariake peak, that recur throughout his work.

That subject matter situates Fukumoto within a long tradition of Japanese mountain prints, running from the Hokusai and Hiroshige views of Mount Fuji through the Yoshida Hiroshi and Kawase Hasui shin-hanga mountain depictions to the contemporary celebration of Japan's mountain landscape. Beyond the CWAJ Print Show entry, the fullest record of his work is maintained through his own Azumino SKY workshop.