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 turned toward the sōsaku-hanga ideal of jiga-jikoku-jizuri — self-drawn, self-carved, and self-printed — producing his postwar works largely without a publisher's intermediation. 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), Yoshida Ayomi (daughter of Hodaka), and Saitō Tatsuko, 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.