Fukami Gashu
深見画秀
1953
Japan
Biography
Gashu Fukami (born 1953, Kumamoto Prefecture, Kyushu) is a contemporary Japanese mokuhanga artist whose self-drawn, self-carved, and self-printed practice extends the sōsaku-hanga ethic into the twenty-first century. He grew up in rural Kumamoto and moved north to Kyoto for university, graduating from Doshisha University, one of Japan's leading private universities, in 1975 with a degree outside the fine arts (The Ren Brown Collection, https://renbrown.com/bio/fukami-gashu/; Ronin Gallery, https://www.roningallery.com/artists/gashu-fukami). It was during his student years in Kyoto that he encountered the work of the senior creative-print artists Azechi Umetarō (1902–1999) and Asano Takeji (1900–1998). Azechi's stocky, deliberately naive woodcuts of Japanese mountaineers and Asano's calm, geometrically composed Kyoto landscapes convinced him that contemporary woodblock printing could be a serious independent vocation rather than a craft adjunct to painting; the encounter is consistently cited in dealer biographies as the decisive moment of his artistic formation (Ronin Gallery, https://www.roningallery.com/artists/gashu-fukami; The Ren Brown Collection, https://renbrown.com/bio/fukami-gashu/). He began studying printmaking in Kyoto in 1977 and the following year traveled to the United States, where he spent roughly a year at the Kaji Aso Studio in Boston, a school founded in 1973 by the Japanese painter and educator Kaji Aso (1936–2006) to teach an integrated practice of Japanese painting, calligraphy, ceramics, and printmaking in a Western setting. That Boston interval gave Fukami sustained exposure to a non-Japanese audience for mokuhanga at the precise moment that Western interest in hand-printed Japanese woodblock as a contemporary art form was beginning to revive. Fukami returned to Kyoto in 1983 and held his first solo exhibition at the city's Heian Gallery, continuing to develop a personal vocabulary in color woodblock through the second half of the 1980s (The Ren Brown Collection, https://renbrown.com/bio/fukami-gashu/; Ronin Gallery, https://www.roningallery.com/artists/gashu-fukami). In 1997 he relocated to Nagasaki, settling in a mountainside house overlooking the coast — a landscape that he has cited as a continuing source of imagery — and in 1999 he moved again to Fukuoka in northern Kyushu, where he has continued to work since (Ronin Gallery, https://www.roningallery.com/artists/gashu-fukami; The Ren Brown Collection, https://renbrown.com/bio/fukami-gashu/). Technically, Fukami works in color mokuhanga, cutting his own blocks and printing by hand with water-based pigments on Japanese paper in the manner descended from the Edo-period ukiyo-e workshop but stripped of the workshop division of labor: in the orthodox sōsaku-hanga formulation he is jiga, jikoku, jizuri — the same hand draws, carves, and prints (Ronin Gallery, https://www.roningallery.com/artists/gashu-fukami). His sheets are typically small to medium in scale, suited to intimate viewing and the album or hanging-scroll mounting of traditional Japanese print presentation rather than to the wall-sized installation common in contemporary Western printmaking. The imagery is built on flat planes of saturated color, simplified contour, and a faintly cartoon-like sense of caricature: birds, cats, hares, insects, still-life arrangements, and occasional figure studies are rendered with what dealers consistently describe as a "whimsical," "playful," or "exuberant" sensibility, making familiar subjects look slightly uncanny (Ronin Gallery, https://www.roningallery.com/artists/gashu-fukami; The Ren Brown Collection, https://renbrown.com/bio/fukami-gashu/). The animal-zodiac New Year prints—"The Year of the Rabbit," "The Year of the Boar in the Bamboo Grove," and similar zodiac subjects produced annually for the Japanese New Year — are among his most widely circulated images and have become collector touchstones in the United States (Ronin Gallery, https://www.roningallery.com/the-year-of-the-rabbit; https://www.roningallery.com/The-Year-of-the-Boar-In-the-Bamboo-Grove). Single-figure subjects such as "Lying Cat" and "We Hold Each Other's Hand" demonstrate the same flat-color, contoured idiom in domestic and tender register (Ronin Gallery, https://www.roningallery.com/lying-cat; https://www.roningallery.com/we-hold-each-other-s-hand). His emphasis on bold color rather than ink-based monochrome distinguishes him from the sumi-tradition wing of contemporary mokuhanga and aligns his work more closely with the brightly colored creative-print lineage of Azechi than with the austere graphic line of artists such as Munakata Shikō. Fukami has held one-person exhibitions in Fukuoka, Nagasaki, Wakayama, Osaka, and Kyoto, and has shown internationally through the Ronin Gallery in New York and through specialist dealers in Australia and the United States, including The Ren Brown Collection in California (The Ren Brown Collection, https://renbrown.com/bio/fukami-gashu/; Ronin Gallery, https://www.roningallery.com/artists/gashu-fukami; Saru Gallery, https://www.sarugallery.com/japanese_woodblock_prints_ukiyoe/artists/gashu_fukami.html). Public museum holdings of his work and major prize records are not well documented in the English-language literature consulted; his reputation rests instead on a sustained gallery presence in Japan, the United States, and Europe across more than three decades of independent practice and on a remarkably consistent body of small, hand-pulled color woodblocks that have helped keep the sōsaku-hanga model of self-printed mokuhanga visibly alive into the contemporary era.
Key Facts
- Active Period
- 1953
- Nationality
- 🇯🇵Japan
Frequently Asked Questions
Gashu Fukami (born 1953, Kumamoto Prefecture, Kyushu) is a contemporary Japanese mokuhanga artist whose self-drawn, self-carved, and self-printed practice extends the sōsaku-hanga ethic into the twenty-first century. He grew up in rural Kumamoto and moved north to Kyoto for university, graduating from Doshisha University, one of Japan's leading private universities, in 1975 with a degree outside the fine arts (The Ren Brown Collection, https://renbrown.com/bio/fukami-gashu/; Ronin Gallery, https://www.roningallery.com/artists/gashu-fukami). It was during his student years in Kyoto that he encountered the work of the senior creative-print artists Azechi Umetarō (1902–1999) and Asano Takeji (1900–1998). Azechi's stocky, deliberately naive woodcuts of Japanese mountaineers and Asano's calm, geometrically composed Kyoto landscapes convinced him that contemporary woodblock printing could be a serious independent vocation rather than a craft adjunct to painting; the encounter is consistently cited in dealer biographies as the decisive moment of his artistic formation (Ronin Gallery, https://www.roningallery.com/artists/gashu-fukami; The Ren Brown Collection, https://renbrown.com/bio/fukami-gashu/). He began studying printmaking in Kyoto in 1977 and the following year traveled to the United States, where he spent roughly a year at the Kaji Aso Studio in Boston, a school founded in 1973 by the Japanese painter and educator Kaji Aso (1936–2006) to teach an integrated practice of Japanese painting, calligraphy, ceramics, and printmaking in a Western setting. That Boston interval gave Fukami sustained exposure to a non-Japanese audience for mokuhanga at the precise moment that Western interest in hand-printed Japanese woodblock as a contemporary art form was beginning to revive. Fukami returned to Kyoto in 1983 and held his first solo exhibition at the city's Heian Gallery, continuing to develop a personal vocabulary in color woodblock through the second half of the 1980s (The Ren Brown Collection, https://renbrown.com/bio/fukami-gashu/; Ronin Gallery, https://www.roningallery.com/artists/gashu-fukami). In 1997 he relocated to Nagasaki, settling in a mountainside house overlooking the coast — a landscape that he has cited as a continuing source of imagery — and in 1999 he moved again to Fukuoka in northern Kyushu, where he has continued to work since (Ronin Gallery, https://www.roningallery.com/artists/gashu-fukami; The Ren Brown Collection, https://renbrown.com/bio/fukami-gashu/). Technically, Fukami works in color mokuhanga, cutting his own blocks and printing by hand with water-based pigments on Japanese paper in the manner descended from the Edo-period ukiyo-e workshop but stripped of the workshop division of labor: in the orthodox sōsaku-hanga formulation he is jiga, jikoku, jizuri — the same hand draws, carves, and prints (Ronin Gallery, https://www.roningallery.com/artists/gashu-fukami). His sheets are typically small to medium in scale, suited to intimate viewing and the album or hanging-scroll mounting of traditional Japanese print presentation rather than to the wall-sized installation common in contemporary Western printmaking. The imagery is built on flat planes of saturated color, simplified contour, and a faintly cartoon-like sense of caricature: birds, cats, hares, insects, still-life arrangements, and occasional figure studies are rendered with what dealers consistently describe as a "whimsical," "playful," or "exuberant" sensibility, making familiar subjects look slightly uncanny (Ronin Gallery, https://www.roningallery.com/artists/gashu-fukami; The Ren Brown Collection, https://renbrown.com/bio/fukami-gashu/). The animal-zodiac New Year prints—"The Year of the Rabbit," "The Year of the Boar in the Bamboo Grove," and similar zodiac subjects produced annually for the Japanese New Year — are among his most widely circulated images and have become collector touchstones in the United States (Ronin Gallery, https://www.roningallery.com/the-year-of-the-rabbit; https://www.roningallery.com/The-Year-of-the-Boar-In-the-Bamboo-Grove). Single-figure subjects such as "Lying Cat" and "We Hold Each Other's Hand" demonstrate the same flat-color, contoured idiom in domestic and tender register (Ronin Gallery, https://www.roningallery.com/lying-cat; https://www.roningallery.com/we-hold-each-other-s-hand). His emphasis on bold color rather than ink-based monochrome distinguishes him from the sumi-tradition wing of contemporary mokuhanga and aligns his work more closely with the brightly colored creative-print lineage of Azechi than with the austere graphic line of artists such as Munakata Shikō. Fukami has held one-person exhibitions in Fukuoka, Nagasaki, Wakayama, Osaka, and Kyoto, and has shown internationally through the Ronin Gallery in New York and through specialist dealers in Australia and the United States, including The Ren Brown Collection in California (The Ren Brown Collection, https://renbrown.com/bio/fukami-gashu/; Ronin Gallery, https://www.roningallery.com/artists/gashu-fukami; Saru Gallery, https://www.sarugallery.com/japanese_woodblock_prints_ukiyoe/artists/gashu_fukami.html). Public museum holdings of his work and major prize records are not well documented in the English-language literature consulted; his reputation rests instead on a sustained gallery presence in Japan, the United States, and Europe across more than three decades of independent practice and on a remarkably consistent body of small, hand-pulled color woodblocks that have helped keep the sōsaku-hanga model of self-printed mokuhanga visibly alive into the contemporary era.
Fukami Gashu was active born in 1953.
Fukami Gashu's prints frequently feature cats, birds & flowers, animals, rivers & lakes, snow scenes, children.
Fukami Gashu was active during the shin-hanga era and produced woodblock prints in the traditional Japanese aesthetic. Prints from this period benefit from strong collector interest. Prices range from $150 for more common subjects to $5,000 for rare designs in excellent condition. Most prints sell in the $480–$1600 range. Edition and condition are important price factors. The overall shin-hanga market has shown consistent strength.
