Nakajima Kiyoshi

Kiyoshi Nakajima (中島潔, born April 1943 in Manchuria) is a Japanese painter, children's-book illustrator, and limited-edition woodblock-print designer best known by the epithet "painter of the wind" (風の画家, kaze no gaka). His connection to the woodblock tradition is real but secondary: he is primarily a painter in the Japanese figurative idiom whose painted images of solitary, wind-blown young women have, since the 1980s, been adapted into a comparatively small body of color woodblock editions that have circulated alongside the original paintings on the postwar Japanese print market.

Nakajima was born in Manchuria during the final phase of the Japanese occupation; after Japan's defeat in 1945 his family, like many other Japanese settlers in the former Manchukuo, was repatriated to Japan. They resettled in Saga Prefecture in northwestern Kyushu, where he attended Nishi-Karatsu Prefectural High School. His adolescence was marked by serious family disruption: his mother died of cancer as he was finishing high school, around the age of eighteen; his father remarried two months later; and the resulting upheaval left him unable to sit his college entrance examinations and kept him from following the conventional academic route into the fine arts.

In 1964, the year of the Tokyo Olympics, he moved alone to the capital and entered the world of advertising, working in commercial illustration and taking on part-time cartooning work while sending part of his earnings home to support his sister, who was still in school. Those years gave him a disciplined commercial training in pictorial composition and figure drawing that would resurface later in the polish of his mature painting and print work. At twenty-eight he left Japan for Paris, where he studied painting and gradually redirected his practice from commercial illustration toward painting in his own right. By the mid-1970s he had established himself as an independent artist and begun holding solo exhibitions; his decisive breakthrough came in 1982, when a touring exhibition of his paintings traveled to museums and galleries across the country and the critic Susumu Abe coined the nickname "painter of the wind," reading Nakajima's recurring motif of a girl whose hair, sleeves, and surroundings are stirred by an unseen breeze as the work's defining theme. The label has clung to him ever since and is reproduced in nearly every later catalog and gallery introduction.

From the early 1980s onward Nakajima has also worked extensively as an illustrator of children's books and picture-books based on Japanese folktales and the seasons; in 1987 he received the Graphic Prize at the International Children's Book Fair in Bologna, one of the most prestigious distinctions in the field, marking an extension of his reputation beyond the fine-art circuit and into the broader Japanese illustrated-book market. His woodblock editions, produced from the 1980s onward through Japanese print publishers in dialogue with traditional carvers and printers, translate his painted girls into editioned color sheets — typically pencil-signed and numbered in small editions, and often in unusually large dimensions for a contemporary mokuhanga — circulated by specialist dealers including Moonlit Sea Prints, Shin Hanga Gallery, and Ohmi Gallery.

The melancholy of his subjects — girls in transitional states, half-turned away, eyes shadowed, ribbons and hair pulled by an invisible wind — has invited critical comparison with both the wistful bijin-ga of the shin-hanga era and the introspective figure work of postwar Japanese illustration, and is often paired with Japanese seasonal motifs such as cherry blossom, butterflies, and snow drawn from his children's-book practice.