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 presence in Tokyo galleries — where his lithographs, mokuhanga, and drypoints have 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 in September 2017, where he delivered a public lecture on his printmaking practice in the school's Printmaking Studios.

His prints are held in Japanese university collections and in private collections in the United States and Europe, and his standing in the field is reflected in the Miida Seiichiro Award, given at the TKO International Mini Print Exhibition; the contemporary Japanese printmaker Yukie Kishi received the award at the inaugural TKO International Mini Print Exhibition in 2016.

His position at Tokyo Geidai's Faculty of Fine Arts places him within the senior-faculty cohort that has followed Tetsuya Noda at the school, continuing 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 helped structure contemporary Japanese mokuhanga's international circulation.

Within the contemporary Japanese mokuhanga community Miida represents the Tokyo Geidai-led shallow-cut, hand-printed practice, distinct from both the deep-cut traditions of older commercial woodblock printing and the loose-edged abstract mokuhanga of the international post-1990s generation. Tokyo dealer galleries and the Geidai exhibition programme form the principal channel through which his work circulates.