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 principal subjects have moved from gardens and floral compositions through architectural elevations to a long-running engagement with water seen from beneath the surface. His mastery of the bokashi technique — gradient ink layering in which colour shifts from dark to light without any visible break — has become the hallmark of his prints, and his preference for French print titles, even when the imagery refers to Japanese or Mediterranean settings, signals his sustained connection to the European print tradition.

Kasai trained at Tokyo Gakugei University, graduating in 1978. He then moved to France, where he studied at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, choosing silkscreen as his medium. The French experience and the studio access at the École allowed him to develop the technical depth and the bilingual print vocabulary that characterizes his mature work. All his prints are titled in French — 'L'arabesque verte,' 'Bosphorus II,' 'L'arabesque d'olivier,' 'La lumière passe sous l'arbre VI,' 'Cote d'or' — 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 method 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 ten years he has concentrated on the theme of water, viewed from within — looking up through a body of water at the light penetrating from above. The series began with the prints titled 'La Musique de la Mer' and continued through the 'Bosphorus,' 'Istanbul — l'air de Mimar Sinan,' and 'L'arabesque de l'olivier' series. Selected prints from the water series are held in the public collection of the Library of Congress through CWAJ Print Show selection, and the series is the principal commercial channel through which his work has reached Western audiences.

Kasai is represented in London by Hanga Ten, the principal UK contemporary Japanese print gallery, where his prints — typically issued in editions of 50 to 100, signed and numbered by the artist — circulate alongside those of his peers in the Japanese silkscreen tradition. Yoseido Gallery in Tokyo is his Japanese commercial representation. He is also represented through Kyoto Prints (Kyoto), where his prints from the late 2000s and 2010s have been catalogued — including 'La Mer du Higashi Shina' (2010) and 'Petit Cosmos.' Selected prints have appeared in the annual CWAJ Print Show, and his work is held in the College Women's Association of Japan Print Show Collection at the Library of Congress.