Biography
Takuji Hamanaka (浜中拓司) is a Japanese-born printmaker who lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. Published sources, including the Brooklyn-based Print Center New York and the Kala Art Institute fellowship roster, identify Hokkaido as his place of birth; the year most consistently cited in gallery and residency profiles is 1968, and earlier dates that occasionally appear in collector databases appear to derive from data entry errors. His professional training began in Tokyo at the Adachi Institute of Woodcut Prints (Adachi Hanga Kenkyūjo), the Bunkyō workshop founded in 1928 by Adachi Toyohisa that has been responsible for much of the post-war reproduction of Edo-period ukiyo-e and for the technical training of carvers and printers in the traditional method. Hamanaka spent three years at Adachi making reproductions of Hiroshige and other Edo masters, which gave him a thorough grounding as a printer rather than a designer, and he subsequently moved to a contemporary Tokyo workshop where he editioned prints for living artists. He relocated to New York in the early 1990s and joined Watanabe Studio Ltd. in Brooklyn, the workshop run by the master printer Watanabe Tadashi, where he worked on a sustained series of woodcut editions for Sol LeWitt as well as projects with Donald Sultan and other New York artists from the 1960s–70s generation. He left Watanabe in 1993 to take a studio in Greenpoint and to begin printing for individual artists under his own name, and his current studio practice combines that long career as a master printer with his own original work. The signature register of his recent work is a hybrid of mokuhanga and collage, in which he carves and prints multiple-block woodcuts on extremely thin Japanese gampi tissue and then cuts the printed sheets into hundreds of small, repeating shapes that are reassembled and adhered onto a larger paper support. The result is a layered, biomorphic image whose color is built up additively from translucent overlay rather than from the saturation of a single block, and which preserves the matte, brush-applied surface of traditional mokuhanga while extending it into a contemporary collage idiom. His work is represented by Owen James Gallery in New York and has been distributed through the L&L Arts and Kristen Lorello programs; exhibition venues include the Print Center New York (formerly the International Print Center New York), Whitman College in Walla Walla, the National Academy of Fine Arts in India, the Royal Scottish Academy in Edinburgh, and Powerhouse Arts Brooklyn. Awards and residencies include a New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA) Fellowship in printmaking (2011), a Kala Art Institute Fellowship in Berkeley, a Barbara and Thomas Putnam Fellowship at the MacDowell Colony (2013), an Open Studios residency at the Museum of Arts and Design (also 2013), and a residency at Haystack Mountain School of Crafts. He teaches mokuhanga at the Manhattan Graphics Center and the Center for Book Arts in New York and has lectured at the University of Michigan's Stamps School of Art and Design among other institutions. Hamanaka's career is one of the clearest North American examples of a printmaker who was first trained in the Edo-derived workshop discipline of the Adachi Institute, used that training as a working master printer for senior contemporary artists in New York, and only then turned the same technical apparatus to the production of an independent body of work — a trajectory that makes him a useful reference point for the post-2000 generation of non-Japanese mokuhanga practitioners who have come to the medium through formalized training rather than self-instruction.
Key Facts
- Active Period
- 1968
- Nationality
- 🇯🇵Japan
- Movement
- Contemporary Mokuhanga
- Works Indexed
Frequently Asked Questions
Takuji Hamanaka (浜中拓司) is a Japanese-born printmaker who lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. Published sources, including the Brooklyn-based Print Center New York and the Kala Art Institute fellowship roster, identify Hokkaido as his place of birth; the year most consistently cited in gallery and residency profiles is 1968, and earlier dates that occasionally appear in collector databases appear to derive from data entry errors. His professional training began in Tokyo at the Adachi Institute of Woodcut Prints (Adachi Hanga Kenkyūjo), the Bunkyō workshop founded in 1928 by Adachi Toyohisa that has been responsible for much of the post-war reproduction of Edo-period ukiyo-e and for the technical training of carvers and printers in the traditional method. Hamanaka spent three years at Adachi making reproductions of Hiroshige and other Edo masters, which gave him a thorough grounding as a printer rather than a designer, and he subsequently moved to a contemporary Tokyo workshop where he editioned prints for living artists. He relocated to New York in the early 1990s and joined Watanabe Studio Ltd. in Brooklyn, the workshop run by the master printer Watanabe Tadashi, where he worked on a sustained series of woodcut editions for Sol LeWitt as well as projects with Donald Sultan and other New York artists from the 1960s–70s generation. He left Watanabe in 1993 to take a studio in Greenpoint and to begin printing for individual artists under his own name, and his current studio practice combines that long career as a master printer with his own original work. The signature register of his recent work is a hybrid of mokuhanga and collage, in which he carves and prints multiple-block woodcuts on extremely thin Japanese gampi tissue and then cuts the printed sheets into hundreds of small, repeating shapes that are reassembled and adhered onto a larger paper support. The result is a layered, biomorphic image whose color is built up additively from translucent overlay rather than from the saturation of a single block, and which preserves the matte, brush-applied surface of traditional mokuhanga while extending it into a contemporary collage idiom. His work is represented by Owen James Gallery in New York and has been distributed through the L&L Arts and Kristen Lorello programs; exhibition venues include the Print Center New York (formerly the International Print Center New York), Whitman College in Walla Walla, the National Academy of Fine Arts in India, the Royal Scottish Academy in Edinburgh, and Powerhouse Arts Brooklyn. Awards and residencies include a New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA) Fellowship in printmaking (2011), a Kala Art Institute Fellowship in Berkeley, a Barbara and Thomas Putnam Fellowship at the MacDowell Colony (2013), an Open Studios residency at the Museum of Arts and Design (also 2013), and a residency at Haystack Mountain School of Crafts. He teaches mokuhanga at the Manhattan Graphics Center and the Center for Book Arts in New York and has lectured at the University of Michigan's Stamps School of Art and Design among other institutions. Hamanaka's career is one of the clearest North American examples of a printmaker who was first trained in the Edo-derived workshop discipline of the Adachi Institute, used that training as a working master printer for senior contemporary artists in New York, and only then turned the same technical apparatus to the production of an independent body of work — a trajectory that makes him a useful reference point for the post-2000 generation of non-Japanese mokuhanga practitioners who have come to the medium through formalized training rather than self-instruction.
Takuji Hamanaka was active born in 1968. They were associated with the Contemporary Mokuhanga movement.
Takuji Hamanaka'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.
Takuji Hamanaka's prints frequently feature abstract, summer, moonlight.
Takuji Hamanaka 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.
