Biography
Izumi Kawai (born 1980, Nagasaki Prefecture) is a Japanese lithographer whose intimate mid-format compositions stage everyday objects — tables, vessels, the half-glimpsed interior of a room — within a soft tonal field that reads as both perceptual and dreamlike. Based in Tokyo, she trained at the Laarl Vérité Lithography Research Institute under the senior lithographer Yasutoshi Ishibashi, and her practice continues the Japanese tradition of fine-grain stone lithography that runs from Komai Tetsurō through to the present day.
Kawai's training at Laarl Vérité places her within the small community of Japanese lithographers who have studied directly under the institute's longtime director Yasutoshi Ishibashi, a senior practitioner who has trained successive generations of Tokyo-area stone lithographers. The institute occupies a distinctive position in the Japanese print field: while most younger Japanese printmakers train at university printmaking departments, Laarl Vérité functions as a private studio-school where students learn the lithographic process by working directly on the stone for years, producing a small but technically sophisticated cohort of lithographers each decade.
Her 2023 print 'Dream on the Side Table (サイドテーブルの夢)' — selected for the 68th CWAJ Print Show in 2025 — is a vertical 63 × 46 cm composition. The title sets up the visual proposition: the side table as a domestic surface where a moment of reverie unfolds. The lithograph allows for the soft, atmospheric handling of light and shadow that characterizes her work; the stone surface, drawn on with the lithographer's greasy crayon, holds tonal nuance that the etched plate or the cut woodblock cannot match in this register.
Kawai's practice belongs to a small but cohesive Tokyo lithography scene. The combination of her Laarl Vérité training under Ishibashi and her sustained CWAJ Print Show participation — the principal commercial channel for contemporary Japanese print — places her among the steadily producing younger Tokyo lithographers whose work continues the technical and atmospheric vocabulary of the postwar lithographic tradition.
Key Facts
- Active Period
- 1980
- Nationality
- 🇯🇵Japan
- Movement
- Contemporary Mokuhanga
- Works Indexed
- 1
Frequently Asked Questions
Izumi Kawai (born 1980, Nagasaki Prefecture) is a Japanese lithographer whose intimate mid-format compositions stage everyday objects — tables, vessels, the half-glimpsed interior of a room — within a soft tonal field that reads as both perceptual and dreamlike. Based in Tokyo, she trained at the Laarl Vérité Lithography Research Institute under the senior lithographer Yasutoshi Ishibashi, and her practice continues the Japanese tradition of fine-grain stone lithography that runs from Komai Tetsurō through to the present day.
Izumi Kawai was active born in 1980. They were associated with the Contemporary Mokuhanga movement.
Izumi Kawai's work was shaped by the Contemporary Mokuhanga tradition in Japanese woodblock printmaking. Contemporary Mokuhanga: Contemporary mokuhanga (literally "wood-block print") encompasses artists working from approximately 1970 to the present who continue or reinvent traditional Japanese woodblock printing techniques.