Biography
Hiroki Satake (佐竹宏樹) is a Japanese mokuhanga printmaker and educator based at Tokyo Zokei University, where he is a member of the printmaking faculty. He is one of the most internationally active Japanese mokuhanga teachers of his generation, having presented woodblock-carving lectures and demonstrations on multiple occasions in the United States — most prominently at the 2015 inaugural lecture-demonstration for the Walla Walla Mokuhanga Center at Whitman College. The 2015 Whitman demonstration covered three core areas: woodblock carving techniques, the sharpening and care of woodblock carving tools, and bokashi (graduated-tone printing) techniques — the standard pedagogical sequence for transmitting traditional Japanese mokuhanga technique to students working outside Japan.
Satake's institutional anchor at Tokyo Zokei University places him within the small group of Tokyo-area printmaking faculty who maintain active international teaching schedules alongside their Japanese pedagogy. Tokyo Zokei University, founded 1966 in Hachioji and known for its design and art programmes, has been a sustained source of contemporary Japanese mokuhanga educators, and Satake's role there extends a teaching lineage that connects 1960s-era Tokyo Zokei printmaking to the contemporary international mokuhanga revival. His 2008 solo exhibition 'Greeting Flower' at Switch Point in Kokubunji, Tokyo (3-14 July 2008), with an accompanying open-auditing workshop on 5 July, marks an early stage of his sustained gallery presence in the Tokyo print scene.
He is one of the fourteen artists in the Nagasawa 14 'NOIR / KURO' international mokuhanga exchange portfolio coordinated by Nel Pak and Michael Reed, which placed him alongside the major working mokuhanga artists internationally — Yoonmi Nam (USA), April Vollmer (USA), Eva Pietzcker (Germany), Miriam Zegrer (Germany), Haruka Furusaka (Japan), Aleksander Wozniak (Poland), and others. The Nagasawa portfolio system — emerging from the Nagasawa Art Park residency programme in Awaji and continuing through the Nagasawa 10 and Nagasawa 14 successor exchanges — is a principal channel through which Japanese mokuhanga educators sustain professional ties with their international counterparts. Cindi Ettinger contributed the wood-relief and letterpress colophon for the NOIR portfolio.
Satake's exhibition record places him within the network of Tokyo-area mokuhanga educators whose work circulates through the Mokuhanga Project Space (an international online and physical gallery for working mokuhanga artists) and the International Mokuhanga Conference (IMC) cycle. Beyond the 2008 Switch Point exhibition, the 2015 Walla Walla demonstration, and the NOIR exchange portfolio, his institutional positioning aligns him with the broader Tokyo Zokei printmaking faculty whose research engages the technical lineage of the medium — block preparation, kento registration, ink mixing, baren technique, washi paper selection, and the bokashi-gradient method that gives Japanese mokuhanga its distinctive tonal range.
Key Facts
- Nationality
- 🇯🇵Japan
- Movement
- Contemporary Mokuhanga
Frequently Asked Questions
Hiroki Satake (佐竹宏樹) is a Japanese mokuhanga printmaker and educator based at Tokyo Zokei University, where he is a member of the printmaking faculty. He is one of the most internationally active Japanese mokuhanga teachers of his generation, having presented woodblock-carving lectures and demonstrations on multiple occasions in the United States — most prominently at the 2015 inaugural lecture-demonstration for the Walla Walla Mokuhanga Center at Whitman College. The 2015 Whitman demonstration covered three core areas: woodblock carving techniques, the sharpening and care of woodblock carving tools, and bokashi (graduated-tone printing) techniques — the standard pedagogical sequence for transmitting traditional Japanese mokuhanga technique to students working outside Japan.
Hiroki Satake'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.