Biography
Hiroki Satake (佐竹宏樹) is a Japanese mokuhanga printmaker and educator affiliated with Tokyo Zokei University, and one of the internationally active Japanese mokuhanga teachers of his generation. He has taught at MI-LAB (Mokuhanga Innovation Laboratory) and has given woodblock-carving demonstrations abroad, most prominently the 2015 inaugural lecture-demonstration for the Walla Walla Mokuhanga Center at Whitman College. That demonstration covered three core areas: woodblock carving techniques, the sharpening and care of woodblock carving tools, and bokashi (graduated-tone printing) — the standard pedagogical sequence for transmitting traditional Japanese mokuhanga technique to students working outside Japan.
His gallery activity in Tokyo dates back at least to his 2008 solo exhibition "Greeting Flower" at Switch Point in Kokubunji, which included an open-auditing workshop on 5 July.
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 working mokuhanga artists from around the world — among them Yoonmi Nam (USA), April Vollmer (USA), Eva Pietzcker (Germany), Miriam Zegrer (Germany), Haruka Furusaka (Japan), and Alexander Wozniak (Poland); Cindi Ettinger contributed the portfolio's wood-relief and letterpress colophon. The Nagasawa 14 group is drawn largely from past participants in the Nagasawa artist-in-residence programme, established by the Center for the Science of Human Endeavour to teach the skills of Japanese watercolour woodblock printing to contemporary artists, and its members have sustained ties through exchange portfolios, exhibitions, and the International Mokuhanga Conference (IMC) cycle; the NOIR / KURO portfolio was presented in connection with the 2021 conference.
Satake belongs to a relatively small group of Japan-based educators who actively transmit traditional mokuhanga technique to international students, working through channels such as MI-LAB, the Nagasawa lineage, and the Tokyo Zokei printmaking programme. His sustained demonstration activity — block preparation, kento registration, tool sharpening, baren technique, and the bokashi-gradient method that gives Japanese mokuhanga its distinctive tonal range — makes him a recognizable figure in the transpacific transmission of the medium. Beyond the documented 2008, 2015, and 2021 activity, biographical detail on Satake — birth year, training pathway, and prior teaching positions — is not readily surfaced through public-facing English-language channels.
Key Facts
- Nationality
- 🇯🇵Japan
- Movement
- Contemporary Mokuhanga
Frequently Asked Questions
Hiroki Satake (佐竹宏樹) is a Japanese mokuhanga printmaker and educator affiliated with Tokyo Zokei University, and one of the internationally active Japanese mokuhanga teachers of his generation. He has taught at MI-LAB (Mokuhanga Innovation Laboratory) and has given woodblock-carving demonstrations abroad, most prominently the 2015 inaugural lecture-demonstration for the Walla Walla Mokuhanga Center at Whitman College. That demonstration covered three core areas: woodblock carving techniques, the sharpening and care of woodblock carving tools, and bokashi (graduated-tone printing) — 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.