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 Lâle Vérité Lithography Research Institute under the lithographer Yasutoshi Ishibashi, and works in fine-grain stone lithography.
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.
Her participation in the CWAJ Print Show — a principal annual venue for contemporary Japanese print — places her among the younger Tokyo lithographers producing quietly atmospheric work in the medium today.
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 Lâle Vérité Lithography Research Institute under the lithographer Yasutoshi Ishibashi, and works in fine-grain stone lithography.
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.