Yasuyuki Kawarai

Yasuyuki Kawarai (born 1997, Tokyo) is an emerging Japanese lithographer with a sustained practice currently based in Saitama Prefecture. His selection in the 68th CWAJ Print Show in 2025 with 'Transition 1' (うつろい １), a substantial 99 × 76 cm lithograph, places him among the youngest cohort of selected artists in the catalog and demonstrates a striking large-format technical command for an early-career artist.

Kawarai received his training at Tokyo Zokei University, one of the principal private Japanese art universities. The Tokyo Zokei University printmaking program is well established across multiple media — woodcut, intaglio, lithography, silkscreen — and the lithography stream in particular has produced a distinguished line of contemporary Japanese print practitioners.

Kawarai's principal teachers were Shunri Ikushima and Keisuke Kinoshita, two senior figures in the Tokyo Zokei University printmaking faculty. The Ikushima/Kinoshita teaching combination provides direct access to the lithographic tradition of the Tokyo Zokei printmaking program.

The substantial 99 × 76 cm sheet size of 'Transition 1' is at the upper end of lithographic practice — a near-metre-tall composition requires substantial press capacity and workshop time, and producing work at this scale as an early-career artist signals both technical command and ambitious compositional intent. The 'Transition 1' (うつろい １, utsuroi 1) numbering suggests the start of a working series, with the Japanese title carrying the connotation of impermanence, change, gradual transformation — a long-running register in Japanese aesthetic thought from the classical concept of mono no aware (the sadness of impermanence) through the contemporary tradition of process-aware visual art.

The CWAJ catalog assigned 'Transition 1' Print No. 064 in the 68th edition.

Further biographical detail beyond the CWAJ Print Show entry — Kawarai's broader exhibition history, gallery representation, undergraduate thesis work, and the planned arc of the 'Transition' series — is not currently surfaced through the public-facing English-language channels. The Tokyo Zokei University alumni records and Tokyo-area emerging-artist exhibition databases would be the principal next-step research targets for extending this bio. As an early-career artist born in 1997, Kawarai's documented practice is still in its first decade; his substantial CWAJ-selected print and his ambitious series numbering suggest a sustained engagement with the medium that is likely to continue across coming editions.