Jinan Kobayashi

Jinan Kobayashi (小林次男, born 1951) is a contemporary Japanese printmaker who specializes in mezzotint, the labour-intensive copperplate intaglio technique in which the whole plate is first roughened with a rocker tool and then selectively scraped and burnished back, yielding luminous gradations from deep black to light. The close-grained tonal surface that is mezzotint's signature is the technical and expressive core of his work — a medium with a distinguished modern history in Japan through masters such as Yōzō Hamaguchi (1909–2000).

Kobayashi has exhibited in the CWAJ Print Show, the long-running exhibition of contemporary Japanese prints organized in Tokyo by the College Women's Association of Japan, whose selections have entered public collections including the U.S. Library of Congress. His entry in the 68th CWAJ Print Show — held in October 2025 in Daikanyama, Tokyo — was a mezzotint titled "Time of Silence — Chinese cabbage" (沈黙の時間 — 白菜), 30 × 47 cm, in an edition of fifteen. In it he treats a single humble motif, a Chinese cabbage (hakusai) shown in both real and reflected form, as a meditation on time and human psychology, finding in the changing state of each leaf the transience of beauty. He chose mezzotint deliberately for the piece, valuing the way its dense black ground can be worked with precision, without the unpredictability of etching.

The choice of an everyday vegetable as the subject of a painstaking intaglio print connects Kobayashi's work to a recurring strain in the postwar Japanese mezzotint tradition, in which ordinary still-life motifs are elevated through the technique's velvety tonal range. Beyond his mezzotint practice and his participation in the CWAJ Print Show, little further biographical detail is available in English-language sources.