Fusako Yoshikawa

Fusako Yoshikawa (born 1941, Nagoya) is a Japanese mokuhanga printmaker whose abstract, bold, dynamically composed multi-block woodblocks have built a sustained body of work across more than four decades of practice. She continues to live and work in Nagoya, and has been a regular figure in the Japan–UK print exchange community since 1999, when the Northern Print studio in Newcastle first exhibited her work as part of an exchange with printmakers from Nagoya.

Yoshikawa's pictorial vocabulary is committed to abstraction. Where most contemporary Japanese mokuhanga artists work in some representational mode — landscape, still life, figure, architecture — Yoshikawa's prints are built on shapes and rich colors arranged into dense, dynamic compositions whose mood is consistently joyful. The titles, when given, are usually descriptive single-word or short titles: 'Hiraku' (opening), 'Tsugine,' 'Natsu' (summer), and 'Private,' each often followed by a number.

Her woodblock practice uses the multiple-block method — four or five separate woodblocks per print, one for each color, registered carefully so that the composition resolves into a unified whole. She cuts the blocks by hand, brushes on water-based inks, and hand-prints each impression with a bamboo baren on Japanese washi paper. Editions are small, often only about five copies. The result is a body of work that pairs the austerity of abstract composition with the warm tactile surface specific to traditional water-based mokuhanga.

Northern Print in Newcastle, England, has represented her in the United Kingdom since that first 1999 exchange and continues to offer her prints through its catalog. From 9 August to 14 October 2023 it presented her first UK exhibition of new work since 2010, underlining the long continuity of her UK presence. Within the contemporary Japanese mokuhanga field, Yoshikawa is one of a small group of artists who have maintained a sustained UK presence over more than two decades, where most contemporary Japanese mokuhanga artists circulate primarily within Japan or in North America.