Masahiro Kasai

Masahiro Kasai (born 1954, Tokyo) is a Japanese silkscreen printmaker who has produced, over more than four decades, a sustained body of editions whose subjects range from floral and garden compositions through architectural elevations to a long-running engagement with water and light. His command of the bokashi technique — gradient ink layering in which colour shifts from dark to light without any visible break — has become a hallmark of his prints, and his consistent use of French print titles, even when the imagery refers to Japanese or Mediterranean settings, signals his sustained connection to the European print tradition.

Kasai graduated from Tokyo Gakugei University in 1978. He then moved to France, where he studied at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris and settled on silkscreen as his medium. The French experience left a lasting imprint: his prints are titled in French — among them 'La Musique de la Mer,' 'La Mer du Higashi Shina,' 'Petit Cosmos,' and 'Le début de l'univers' — even though his subject matter ranges across French, Turkish, and Japanese motifs.

The bokashi technique, which originated in Japanese woodblock printmaking as a method of grading colour from heavy ink at one edge to clear paper at the other, becomes in Kasai's silkscreen practice a means of rendering the gradual penetration of light through water, atmosphere, and foliage. Each print is the product of multiple successive screens, each printing a colour gradient, with the cumulative effect being a continuous tonal field that does not betray the discrete printing operations beneath it.

For more than a decade he has concentrated on the theme of water, seen from within — looking up through a body of water at the light penetrating from above. The series began with prints titled 'La Musique de la Mer,' and nature and light have remained his abiding preoccupations, as he seeks to capture the shifting illumination of the seasons.

Kasai is represented in London by Hanga Ten, a specialist in contemporary Japanese prints, where his silkscreens — issued in signed, numbered editions — circulate alongside those of his peers in the Japanese silkscreen tradition. His prints from the late 2000s and 2010s have also been catalogued by Kyoto Prints, including 'La Mer du Higashi Shina' (2010) and 'Petit Cosmos,' and his work has appeared in the annual CWAJ (College Women's Association of Japan) Print Show. His prints are held in public collections including the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris and the Osaka Contemporary Art Centre.

Kasai's pictorial vocabulary is consistent: the title is set in French, the bokashi gradient runs the dominant length of the sheet, and the subject — a flowering arabesque, an architectural elevation, a stand of trees, the reflective surface of the sea — is rendered in a layered, atmospheric manner that suggests rather than describes. The combination of his French training, his Japanese technical heritage (bokashi via the woodblock tradition), and his sustained engagement with water as a unifying motif places him at a distinctive crossroads within the contemporary Japanese silkscreen field.