Biography
Mania Zyzak is a Polish printmaker, designer, and craft practitioner whose contemporary mokuhanga work entered the international juried record through her selection for the 2024 International Mokuhanga Conference in Echizen, Fukui Prefecture. The print shown in the IMC2024 juried international exhibition — White on Black, 3 — is recorded in the conference catalogue as one piece in a series of five, executed in mokuhanga technique and printed from woodblocks with sumi ink on Okawara washi paper, in a vertical 40-by-15-centimetre format. The serial structure of the project, the limited white-on-black palette, and the choice of Okawara — a heavyweight kōzo paper favored by contemporary mokuhanga practitioners for prints that depend on dense overprinting — place the work squarely inside the reduced, repetitive register of the contemporary mokuhanga revival.
Her broader practice, presented through her own bilingual portfolio site (mania-zyzak.pl) under the tagline Łączę, dopełniam i równoważę ("I connect, complete, and balance"), draws together several adjacent disciplines. She works as a graphic designer and practices kintsugi — the Japanese craft of mending broken ceramics with gold-mixed lacquer — and administers the Polish-language community group Kintsugi Polska. The mokuhanga work sits naturally within this constellation of practices, in which the materials and ethics of Japanese craft — repair, careful sequencing, restraint of palette — recur as a connecting principle.
Beyond the IMC2024 record, her own portfolio, and her kintsugi activity, the publicly available documentary trail is thin: a birth year, a formal art-school affiliation, an extended exhibition history, awards, and museum-collection holdings have not been recovered. She is currently based in Warsaw, one of a small but growing cohort of central European mokuhanga practitioners whose work has so far been most visible internationally through the juried exhibitions of the International Mokuhanga Association.
Key Facts
- Nationality
- 🇵🇱Poland
- Movement
- Contemporary Mokuhanga
Frequently Asked Questions
Mania Zyzak is a Polish printmaker, designer, and craft practitioner whose contemporary mokuhanga work entered the international juried record through her selection for the 2024 International Mokuhanga Conference in Echizen, Fukui Prefecture. The print shown in the IMC2024 juried international exhibition — White on Black, 3 — is recorded in the conference catalogue as one piece in a series of five, executed in mokuhanga technique and printed from woodblocks with sumi ink on Okawara washi paper, in a vertical 40-by-15-centimetre format. The serial structure of the project, the limited white-on-black palette, and the choice of Okawara — a heavyweight kōzo paper favored by contemporary mokuhanga practitioners for prints that depend on dense overprinting — place the work squarely inside the reduced, repetitive register of the contemporary mokuhanga revival.
Mania Zyzak'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.