Seiichi Hiroshima

Seiichi Hiroshima (born 1950, Tokyo) is a Japanese mezzotint master, printer, and print-publisher whose career sits at the intersection of his own artistic practice, his work as a contract printer for other artists, and his role as the founder of one of Tokyo's most active small print presses. He is best known for richly tonal color mezzotints depicting insects, small animals, and quiet seasonal moments — and as the long-running collaborator who pulled most of the editioned mezzotints of the American artist Rick Bartow.

Hiroshima studied economics rather than fine art, completing a B.A. in Economics at St Paul's Rikkyo University in Tokyo in 1973. He came into printmaking as a self-directed practitioner and developed his command of the mezzotint plate through decades of professional studio work. His personal mezzotint methodology — rocking the entire plate to create a finely textured surface, then burnishing back highlights and scraping to develop the image — produces what critics and the artist himself describe as a velvety quality. He often prints in color, layering plates to achieve subtly modulated tonalities that go far beyond the black-and-white tradition usually associated with mezzotint.

His institutional trajectory has been unusually entrepreneurial for a Japanese print artist of his generation. Between 1995 and 2003 he founded and directed the Azabu Kasumicho Gallery in Tokyo, representing fifty-three international artists. In 2002 he established Moon & Dog Press West in South Beach, Oregon, and in 2003 he founded the parallel Moon & Dog Press East in Tokyo. The presses operate as platforms for both his own editions and his work as a printer for visiting artists. Beginning in 1997 he became the principal mezzotint printer for the American painter and printmaker Rick Bartow (1946-2016), with whom he produced more than two hundred editions over nearly two decades — a body of work continuously circulated by Froelick Gallery in Portland, Oregon.

In parallel with the press and the printer-collaborations he has held a long sequence of teaching positions in Japan: Mitsukoshi Cultural School in Tokyo (1989-1998), Aoyama Gakuin College in Tokyo (1989-2001), and Funabashi School of Art and Craft (2006-2010). Each of these positions involved instruction in printmaking and helped circulate his mezzotint methodology among Japanese students and amateur printmakers across Tokyo and the surrounding region.

His own artistic vocabulary is intimate and seasonal. Recurring subjects include praying mantises (Mantis Goes, 2011; Playing Mantis, 2011), tree frogs and small reptiles, snails, evening landscapes (One Spring Evening / Haru No Yoi, 2010), and night skies (November Moon, 2011, color mezzotint). Recent series such as Kimun Kamuy (2024), printed on handmade mitsumata paper, reach back to Ainu cosmology — Kimun Kamuy is the bear deity in Ainu religion — and engage the indigenous mythology of northern Japan. The handmade mitsumata substrate, much softer than typical printmaking paper, gives those late prints a particular tactile quality.