Kasamatsu Mihoko

Kasamatsu Mihoko (笠松 美保子, born 1936) is a Japanese woodblock print artist who occupies a distinctive position in the history of postwar mokuhanga as a second-generation practitioner of the sōsaku-hanga (creative print) tradition. The daughter of the celebrated shin-hanga and sōsaku-hanga artist Kasamatsu Shirō (1898-1991), she came of age during the most transformative decades of twentieth-century Japanese printmaking and has continued to produce woodblock prints into the early twenty-first century. Her work is comparatively scarce in the major museum catalogues that document her father's prolific career, but it is well-represented in the woodblock print collector's market and on dealer-hosted databases such as ukiyo-e.org, where her impressions appear under the romanization Kasamatsu Mihoko.

Mihoko's artistic formation is inseparable from the studio environment created by her father. Kasamatsu Shirō was one of the longest-active artists of his generation, beginning his career in the late Meiji period under the painter Kaburagi Kiyokata, then producing landscape prints for the publisher Watanabe Shōzaburō during the height of the shin-hanga (new print) movement in the 1920s and 1930s. After the Second World War, like a number of his contemporaries, the elder Kasamatsu embraced the sōsaku-hanga ideal of jiga-jikoku-jizuri — self-drawn, self-carved, and self-printed — producing a substantial body of self-published prints in the mid-1950s and 1960s, even as he continued to design works issued through publishers such as the Kyoto house Unsōdō. Mihoko grew up in this household at the precise moment when the sōsaku-hanga movement was gaining international recognition through exhibitions in São Paulo, Lugano, and at American museums, and when foreign collectors stationed in occupied Japan were beginning to build the great postwar print collections that now anchor museums from Honolulu to Chicago.

Within this context, Kasamatsu Mihoko represents a less-documented but historically meaningful pattern: the daughters of established hanga artists who continued the family practice in the second half of the twentieth century. Like Yoshida Chizuko (wife of Hodaka) and Yoshida Ayomi (daughter of Hodaka), Mihoko inherited not just a technique but an entire infrastructure of carving tools, baren, dōsa-sized papers, and pigment knowledge that was difficult for outsiders to assemble in the postwar years. Sōsaku-hanga as a movement valorized the lone artist working through every stage of production, but in practice many of its leading figures relied on familial workshops, and Mihoko's career is best understood as both a continuation of and a quiet variation on her father's mature style.

Her prints share with the late work of Kasamatsu Shirō an attentive naturalism, a preference for intimate motifs over grand landscape, and a palette tuned toward muted, atmospheric tones rather than the saturated blues and reds of the prewar shin-hanga period. Recurrent subjects in her catalogue include domestic still life with flowers, songbirds and owls, cats and other household animals, and small lyrical scenes of the Japanese countryside in changing seasons. Like many sōsaku-hanga artists of her generation, she works in modest editions on relatively standard print formats (F-sized sheets in the dealer notation), and her impressions are typically signed and sealed in pencil rather than carved into the block in the manner of nineteenth-century ukiyo-e.

Mihoko's work also reflects a broader sensibility shared by women printmakers active from the 1960s onward in Japan — artists such as Iwami Reika and the various participants in the Joryū Hanga Kyōkai (Women's Print Association) who pushed mokuhanga toward more personal, contemplative subjects after the war. Where her father in his final decades sometimes returned to the iconic temple and garden scenes of the shin-hanga repertoire, Mihoko's prints lean toward the quotidian: a vase of flowers at a window, a pair of owls roosting in ivy and maple branches, a small child curled against a sibling. These are images that read less as touristic vistas than as observed moments from a domestic life.

Because her father lived until 1991 and continued to issue prints into the late 1980s, the question of attribution between father and daughter becomes nontrivial for collectors. Some impressions catalogued on ukiyo-e.org under the romanization Kasamatsu Shirō are believed by dealers to be Mihoko's own designs, possibly issued from blocks she carved or from her father's studio under her hand. The cataloguing on collector databases is not always consistent, and several titles associated with her — including images of owls, snowy lakes, and flowers framed by windows — have appeared under both names depending on the listing. This kind of ambiguity is common in second-generation sōsaku-hanga households and is unlikely to be fully resolved without a dedicated catalogue raisonné, which has not yet been produced for either Kasamatsu.

Kasamatsu Mihoko has not, to date, been the subject of a major museum retrospective. She does not appear in most of the standard English-language reference works on shin-hanga and sōsaku-hanga, where the chapter on her father typically does not extend into the next generation. Her work circulates instead through Japanese dealer networks, the resale market for postwar mokuhanga, and the photographic archives maintained by long-running specialist sellers. For collectors and researchers, her catalogue is therefore best approached through these dealer databases — most usefully ukiyo-e.org, which indexes images supplied by participating galleries — rather than through institutional collection catalogues.

Viewed alongside the wider postwar Japanese print scene, Mihoko's significance lies in the continuity she represents. The sōsaku-hanga movement defined itself in opposition to the workshop tradition of ukiyo-e, but the next generation of its practitioners often grew up inside literal workshops — the family studio. Kasamatsu Mihoko's prints, modest in ambition and quietly accomplished in technique, offer a window onto how the postwar creative-print ideal was lived and transmitted as ordinary domestic craft. They also extend the working life of the Kasamatsu name well past the twentieth century, with prints under her signature continuing to appear in dealer inventories into the present.