Tagawa Ken

Tagawa Ken (田川憲, 1906–1967) was a Japanese sosaku-hanga (creative print) artist from Nagasaki, remembered above all for woodblock prints devoted to his native city — its harbor, its Western-style architecture, and the long history of contact between Japan and the outside world that set Nagasaki apart from any other Japanese city.

He was born in Nagasaki in 1906. His given name was Ken-ichi (憲一); he dropped the 'ichi' during the Second World War and signed his prints simply 'Ken' thereafter. After graduating from the Nagasaki Business School in 1924 he went to Tokyo, where in 1927 he met Onchi Koshiro, the leading figure of the creative-print movement — an encounter that awakened his interest in woodblock printmaking. He studied at the Kawabata Painting School from 1928 and was later influenced by the print artist Kawakami Sumio, producing his first woodblock prints in 1932.

As a sosaku-hanga artist Tagawa designed, carved, and printed his own blocks. In 1934 he founded the Hanga Nagasaki no Kai, a Nagasaki print society, and in 1941 he joined the Nihon Hanga Kyokai (Japan Print Association); in the early 1940s he was also involved in establishing print groups in Shanghai. His subjects were drawn overwhelmingly from Nagasaki: its Western-style buildings and churches, the traces of its historic foreign settlements, and — in one of his best-known postwar images, dating from 1949 — the ruins left by the atomic bomb.

Tagawa's contributions to the cultural life of his city were recognized with a Nagasaki Distinguished Service Award in 1956 and the Nagasaki Shimbun's first Cultural Seal in 1960. His prints are held today by public collections including the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh, the Honolulu Museum of Art, and the Nagasaki Prefectural Museum of Art.