Yuki Kashiwagi

Yuki Kashiwagi (born 1991, Shizuoka Prefecture) is a Japanese woodcut printmaker who combines traditional hand-carved relief printing with laser-engraved blocks, producing prints whose compositions sit between the sumi-on-washi vocabulary of Japanese woodblock and the precise pattern-driven mark of digital fabrication. Based in Gunma Prefecture, where she has settled after her studies, she belongs to the younger generation of Musashino Art University printmaking graduates whose practice has developed under the direct instruction of senior printmaker Ikeda Ryōji.

Kashiwagi studied at Musashino Art University in Tokyo, training under Ikeda Ryōji (池田良二) — Professor of Printmaking at Musashino, credited with introducing the photo-etching process to Japanese intaglio in the 1980s, and one of the institutional anchors of the contemporary Japanese print field. The intellectual scaffold of the program — Ikeda's commitment to integrating technical innovation with traditional Japanese print history, his emphasis on the physical block as a carrier of memory and trace — directly shapes the conceptual character of Kashiwagi's mature practice.

Her 2025 print 'The Path (とおりみち)' — selected for the 68th CWAJ Print Show — combines hand-carved woodcut with laser-engraved blocks. The hybrid technique uses the laser to etch precision pattern into the block's surface in passages where the artist wishes a finer or more uniform mark than the hand chisel would produce, while leaving the deeper carved areas to be cut by hand. The print combines those two registers in a single sheet, the laser-precise patterning reading visually against the more lyrical hand-carved areas.

This combination — handmade and machine-made on a single woodblock — places Kashiwagi at one of the more innovative edges of contemporary Japanese mokuhanga practice. Younger printmakers in the United States and Europe have increasingly used laser-cut elements, often replacing hand carving entirely; Kashiwagi's practice keeps the human chisel as the primary tool while admitting the laser as a supplemental mark-making device. The result is a hybrid woodblock that respects the craft tradition's authority while opening a new technical channel within it.

She is a member of the Japan Print Association (日本版画家協会), the principal national professional society for printmaking, and a regular participant in CWAJ Print Show selections — the channel through which most younger Japanese printmakers enter the international gallery system. Her residence in Gunma Prefecture connects her to the regional artist community in Takasaki and the surrounding cities, where Murakami Sou (Saki) and several other Musashino-trained printmakers also work.