Biography
Setsuke Morinoue — the slug under which the artist is catalogued here, and a near-certain rendering variant of Setsuko Watanabe Morinoue (森野上節子) — was born in Kanagawa Prefecture, Japan, and is one of the founding figures of the Hawaii-based contemporary art and mokuhanga community that grew up around the village of Hōlualoa on the Kona side of the Big Island. Her interest in art began in high-school photography and turned in early adulthood toward the natural-dye and wax-resist fibre arts kusaki-zome and rōketsu-zome, both of which gave her a working acquaintance with the indigo-and-paste world out of which much later kachō-e printmaking grew. She moved to Hawaii and married the painter and printmaker Hiroki Morinoue in 1970, and shortly after began her sustained training in clay at the Kona Arts Center in Hōlualoa. The bulk of her artistic training has been informal but unusually well-curated — she has worked with the ceramicists Warren MacKenzie, Toshiko Takaezu and Richard Notkin, with the printmakers Karen Kunc and Joan Schulze, and with the fibre artist Noriko Takamiya — and her career has run in parallel with that of her husband as a working artist across ceramics, mixed-media painting, fibre work and printmaking. In November 1979 the Morinoues established Studio 7 Fine Arts gallery in Hōlualoa, recognized in Hawaii as the longest-standing contemporary art gallery in the islands, and she became a key founding member of the Hōlualoa Foundation for Arts and Culture, the non-profit that later evolved into the Donkey Mill Art Center where she long served as volunteer programme director and developed the centre's signature Summer Art Experiences youth programme. Her relationship with mokuhanga deepened markedly through her role as Vice Chair of the Hawaii Local Committee for the Third International Mokuhanga Conference (IMC2017) — the first IMC to be held outside Japan — for which she and Hiroki Morinoue coordinated the conference programme at the East-West Center on O'ahu and the Donkey Mill satellite events at Hōlualoa. Her print Mizumo Oshinohakkai I was included in the IMC2017 juried international exhibition, and her work has been shown periodically through Studio 7 and through the Downtown Art Center in Honolulu (Interpreting the Wild, 2024) alongside her husband and their daughter, the printmaker Miho Morinoue. She has received awards in clay, painting and printmaking across both two- and three-dimensional categories, although a complete prize history has not been compiled in published form. Public and corporate collections holding her work include the Hawai'i State Art Museum, multiple branches of First Hawaiian Bank, the Bank of Hawaii, and the Royal Hawaiian Hotel. The standard biographical apparatus that scholars would expect for an established Japanese-trained printmaker — birth year, formal art-school affiliation, monograph — is not part of her public record; she belongs instead to the cohort of post-1970 Hawaii-based artists whose careers were built through community art centres, family galleries and the international mokuhanga revival, and whose recognition in the dedicated mokuhanga circuit is bound up with the institutional history of the IMC itself.
Key Facts
- Nationality
- 🇺🇸United States
- Movement
- Contemporary Mokuhanga
- Works Indexed
- 2
Frequently Asked Questions
Setsuke Morinoue — the slug under which the artist is catalogued here, and a near-certain rendering variant of Setsuko Watanabe Morinoue (森野上節子) — was born in Kanagawa Prefecture, Japan, and is one of the founding figures of the Hawaii-based contemporary art and mokuhanga community that grew up around the village of Hōlualoa on the Kona side of the Big Island. Her interest in art began in high-school photography and turned in early adulthood toward the natural-dye and wax-resist fibre arts kusaki-zome and rōketsu-zome, both of which gave her a working acquaintance with the indigo-and-paste world out of which much later kachō-e printmaking grew. She moved to Hawaii and married the painter and printmaker Hiroki Morinoue in 1970, and shortly after began her sustained training in clay at the Kona Arts Center in Hōlualoa. The bulk of her artistic training has been informal but unusually well-curated — she has worked with the ceramicists Warren MacKenzie, Toshiko Takaezu and Richard Notkin, with the printmakers Karen Kunc and Joan Schulze, and with the fibre artist Noriko Takamiya — and her career has run in parallel with that of her husband as a working artist across ceramics, mixed-media painting, fibre work and printmaking. In November 1979 the Morinoues established Studio 7 Fine Arts gallery in Hōlualoa, recognized in Hawaii as the longest-standing contemporary art gallery in the islands, and she became a key founding member of the Hōlualoa Foundation for Arts and Culture, the non-profit that later evolved into the Donkey Mill Art Center where she long served as volunteer programme director and developed the centre's signature Summer Art Experiences youth programme. Her relationship with mokuhanga deepened markedly through her role as Vice Chair of the Hawaii Local Committee for the Third International Mokuhanga Conference (IMC2017) — the first IMC to be held outside Japan — for which she and Hiroki Morinoue coordinated the conference programme at the East-West Center on O'ahu and the Donkey Mill satellite events at Hōlualoa. Her print Mizumo Oshinohakkai I was included in the IMC2017 juried international exhibition, and her work has been shown periodically through Studio 7 and through the Downtown Art Center in Honolulu (Interpreting the Wild, 2024) alongside her husband and their daughter, the printmaker Miho Morinoue. She has received awards in clay, painting and printmaking across both two- and three-dimensional categories, although a complete prize history has not been compiled in published form. Public and corporate collections holding her work include the Hawai'i State Art Museum, multiple branches of First Hawaiian Bank, the Bank of Hawaii, and the Royal Hawaiian Hotel. The standard biographical apparatus that scholars would expect for an established Japanese-trained printmaker — birth year, formal art-school affiliation, monograph — is not part of her public record; she belongs instead to the cohort of post-1970 Hawaii-based artists whose careers were built through community art centres, family galleries and the international mokuhanga revival, and whose recognition in the dedicated mokuhanga circuit is bound up with the institutional history of the IMC itself.
Setsuke Morinoue'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.
Setsuke Morinoue is a contemporary printmaker working in the mokuhanga (Japanese woodblock) tradition. Their work contributes to the living tradition of Japanese woodblock printing. Prices for contemporary mokuhanga prints range from $100 for smaller works to $1,500 for major compositions. Most prints sell in the $180–$600 range. The global mokuhanga community has been growing, with increasing exhibition opportunities and collector interest. Contemporary mokuhanga represents an affordable entry point for collectors.
