Haruka Furusaka (b. 1976, Osaka) is a Japanese mokuhanga printmaker, illustrator, and educator whose practice grounds the Japanese water-based woodblock tradition in materials gathered from her surrounding natural environment — soil pigments, cultivated indigo, paper from accessible regional sources. She earned her B.A. in Painting from Musashino Art University in 1999, then worked as an assistant in woodblock print workshops before launching her own practice in 2002. Since 2010 she has run 'Kucyusansou Woodblock Printmaking' (空中山荘 / Mountain Cottage in the Emptiness), a studio and workshop in an old wooden single-storey house in Osaka, where she teaches mokuhanga technique and curates educational programmes including lectures, museum visits, and student exhibitions.
Furusaka treats the mokuhanga medium as a vehicle for engagement with nature rather than as a craft tradition to be preserved at arms-length. Her core working principle — that her technique 'has progressed according to the humid climate in Japan and materials from accessible forests' — articulates a practice that adapts the historical mokuhanga toolset to the contemporary ecological conditions of her working environment. She uses high-quality washi (Japanese paper), traditional carving chisels, and bamboo-sheath barens, but selects her pigments from natural materials in her immediate surroundings — including soil and indigo cultivated from local fields. The resulting prints are characterized by earthy palette, soft tonal modulation, and an ethnographic-landscape orientation toward the human relationship with the natural world.
Major sustained print series include 'Indra's Net and a Mountain' (2013), the 'Duodji from Mt. Reindeer' (トナカイ山のドゥオッジ) cycle (2014-2017) developed during multiple Sami residencies in Norway, 'Soma's Boat' (ソマの舟, 2018-present), and 'The Voice of Lore' (ことづての声, 2019-present), the latter two ongoing concurrent series. The 'Duodji from Mt. Reindeer' series in particular emerged from her artist-in-residence positions at the Sami art centre in Máze, Norway (2003, 2005, 2011), where she lived and worked among the Indigenous Sami reindeer-herding people; the resulting prints address 'the words and handwork of people who coexist with nature.'
Her residencies have included Ateljé Stundars in Finland (2002), the Sami residencies in Norway (2003, 2005, 2011), and the Aomori Contemporary Art Center in Japan (2017). Recent solo exhibitions include 'A Vessel in Layers / Soma's Boat' (2025, multiple venues) and earlier presentations at Gallery Parc in Kyoto. Group exhibitions span international venues in Estonia, Malaysia, Thailand, the United Kingdom, and the United States. She was one of the fourteen artists in the Nagasawa 14 'NOIR / KURO' international mokuhanga exchange portfolio coordinated by Nel Pak and Michael Reed, which placed her within an active international circle of mokuhanga practitioners — alongside Yoonmi Nam, April Vollmer, Hiroki Satake, Eva Pietzcker, Miriam Zegrer, Aleksander Wozniak, and others.
The Kucyusansou studio is named after a Japanese-poetic phrase meaning 'mountain cottage in the empty sky,' a reference to the clarity Furusaka feels during the act of carving and printing. The studio's pedagogical orientation — small-group classes, lectures on tools and technique, museum visits, end-of-term student exhibitions — has produced a continuing lineage of Osaka-area mokuhanga students. Her parallel illustration practice ('Yukinko-do' 2019, 'Chinyui Sodate-Gusa' 2014, 'AINONE FARM' 2025, 'Seed Folks Garden' 2025) extends the mokuhanga visual vocabulary into editorial and book illustration formats.
Within the contemporary international mokuhanga community Furusaka is one of the most visible Japanese voices working in a sustainability-and-locality register — her insistence on local pigment, regional washi, and the human-coexistence-with-nature subject is closer to the Scandinavian-arts-and-crafts and Sami-craft (duodji) sensibility than to the urban-Tokyo mokuhanga scene. Her sustained Norwegian-Japanese cultural exchange through the Sami residencies, and her central role in Kucyusansou's pedagogical lineage, together place her at the centre of a continuing rural-Japanese mokuhanga revival oriented toward the environmental subject.
Haruka Furusaka (b. 1976, Osaka) is a Japanese mokuhanga printmaker, illustrator, and educator whose practice grounds the Japanese water-based woodblock tradition in materials gathered from her surrounding natural environment — soil pigments, cultivated indigo, paper from accessible regional sources. She earned her B.A. in Painting from Musashino Art University in 1999, then worked as an assistant in woodblock print workshops before launching her own practice in 2002. Since 2010 she has run 'Kucyusansou Woodblock Printmaking' (空中山荘 / Mountain Cottage in the Emptiness), a studio and workshop in an old wooden single-storey house in Osaka, where she teaches mokuhanga technique and curates educational programmes including lectures, museum visits, and student exhibitions.
Haruka Furusaka was active born in 1976. They were associated with the Contemporary Mokuhanga movement.
Haruka Furusaka's work was shaped by the Contemporary Mokuhanga tradition in Japanese woodblock printmaking. Contemporary Mokuhanga: Contemporary mokuhanga (literally "wood-block print") encompasses artists working from approximately 1970 to the present who continue or reinvent traditional Japanese woodblock printing techniques.
Haruka Furusaka's prints frequently feature boats & ships.
