Seiichiro Miida

Seiichiro Miida (三井田盛一郎) is a Japanese printmaker and Professor at Tokyo University of the Arts (Tokyo Geidai), Faculty of Fine Arts, Department of Painting. He is one of the principals heading a printmaking research group at Geidai, and his own practice centres on a distinctive personal approach to mokuhanga (Japanese water-based woodblock printing).

Miida's signature technical contribution is the production of shallow-cut, hand-printed woodblock relief prints on kozo paper. He carves his own woodblocks and personally hand-prints each impression, in keeping with the Tokyo Geidai mokuhanga lineage; the shallow-cut technique produces a printed surface in which the relief is at once subtle and intensely tactile, with the kozo washi receiving the pigment in soft, fibrous registration.

His exhibition profile includes a regular Tokyo presence at HIGURE gallery in Nippori (where lithographs, mokuhanga, and drypoints have all been shown), and international visiting-artist appointments such as the Roman J. Witt Visiting Artist programme at the University of Michigan Penny W. Stamps School of Art & Design (September 2017), where he delivered a public lecture on his printmaking practice in the school's Printmaking Studios.

Miida is represented in the Tokyo print scene through HIGURE 17-15 cas Gallery and the wider Tokyo Geidai exhibition programme, and his prints are held in Japanese university collections and private collections in the United States and Europe. He is also publicly recognised as the founder of the eponymous Miida Seiichiro Award, granted at the TKO International Mini Print Exhibition; his fellow contemporary Japanese printmaker Yukie Kishi was a recipient of the award at the inaugural 1st TKO International Mini Print Exhibition in 2016.

His position at Tokyo Geidai's Faculty of Fine Arts places him within the senior-faculty cohort of the post-Akira Kurosaki, post-Tetsuya Noda generation of Japanese printmakers — practitioners who teach at the Geidai print departments and whose work continues the Geidai mokuhanga tradition in dialogue with contemporary print pedagogy. He is one of the active mediators of Japanese woodblock printing into the international university print community, and his Visiting Artist appointment at the University of Michigan exemplifies the Geidai-North American teaching exchange that has structured contemporary Japanese mokuhanga's international circulation.

Within the contemporary Japanese mokuhanga community Miida is a representative case of the Tokyo Geidai-led shallow-cut, kozo-paper, hand-printed practice that diverges from both the deep-cut commercial mokuhanga of the post-Yoshida Hodaka shin-hanga revival and the loose-edged abstract mokuhanga of the international post-1990s generation. The Tokyo-based dealer galleries (HIGURE, Higure News, and the Geidai exhibition apparatus) form the principal commercial channel through which his work circulates.