Biography
Noriko Yanagisawa (born 1940, Hamamatsu, Shizuoka Prefecture) is one of the senior Japanese intaglio printmakers, known for richly atmospheric mixed-technique sheets that combine etching, mezzotint, drypoint, and spit-bite with hand-dyeing on Japanese gampi paper. She studied oil painting at Tokyo University of the Arts (Tokyo Geidai) under the printmaker Tetsurō Komai — the leading figure in postwar Japanese intaglio — and graduated from the Geidai oil painting graduate program in 1965. The training under Komai placed her at the source of the postwar Japanese etching tradition; her own subsequent work has extended that tradition into a quieter, more iconographically loaded register.
Yanagisawa won the Salon de Printemps Prize at Tokyo Geidai in 1963 and the Japan Print Association Prize in 1964 — earlier than most of her cohort. From 1971 through 1975 she was based in New York, working at the Printmaking Workshop in Manhattan and absorbing the experimental American intaglio practice of the period. After returning to Japan she settled in Shizuoka Prefecture, where she continues to maintain her studio.
The iconographic vocabulary she has developed across the 1990s and 2000s is unmistakable: wings, birds, half-human and half-beast figures, ammonites, and other forms drawn from natural-history illustration and mythology, rendered through meticulous intaglio line and atmospheric tonal aquatint. The 1984 illustrated poetry book Umi e (To the Sea), produced with poet Takahiko Okada and the Contemporary Print Center, is an early example of her commitment to long-form serial work. The Shizuoka Prefecture Cultural Encouragement Award (1991) recognized her sustained production. In 1992 she was selected as a Cultural Affairs Agency Special Dispatch Artist for international research; in 1997 she had a solo show at the Bulgaria National Gallery; and in 1998 she presented at the Tikotin Museum (Israel).
Following her 2015 visit to Chernobyl, Yanagisawa's recent work has shifted toward direct response to ecological catastrophe. The Words Spoken by Animals series — including Words Spoken by Animals: Life II (2024), a 62 × 60 cm intaglio-and-hand-dye sheet selected for the 68th CWAJ Print Show in Tokyo — addresses the animals left behind in the Fukushima exclusion zone after the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and the legacy of nuclear testing on non-human life. Her solo exhibition Words Spoken by Animals at Art Front Gallery (Tokyo) in 2024 consolidated this thematic turn.
Yanagisawa is a member of the Japan Print Association and the Japan Art Association. Her prints are held in the British Museum, the Bulgaria National Gallery, the Tikotin Museum (Israel), and Japanese institutional collections including the Tochigi Prefectural Museum of Fine Arts (which holds the Komai collection and her contemporaries' early work) and the Saitama Museum of Modern Art (which mounted the 1994 group exhibition Fruits of Conception: Tetsurō Komai and Contemporary Printmakers placing her in direct lineage with her teacher).
Key Facts
- Active Period
- 1940
- Nationality
- 🇯🇵Japan
- Movement
- Contemporary Mokuhanga
- Subjects
- Figures
- Works Indexed
- 2
Frequently Asked Questions
Noriko Yanagisawa (born 1940, Hamamatsu, Shizuoka Prefecture) is one of the senior Japanese intaglio printmakers, known for richly atmospheric mixed-technique sheets that combine etching, mezzotint, drypoint, and spit-bite with hand-dyeing on Japanese gampi paper. She studied oil painting at Tokyo University of the Arts (Tokyo Geidai) under the printmaker Tetsurō Komai — the leading figure in postwar Japanese intaglio — and graduated from the Geidai oil painting graduate program in 1965. The training under Komai placed her at the source of the postwar Japanese etching tradition; her own subsequent work has extended that tradition into a quieter, more iconographically loaded register.
Noriko Yanagisawa was active born in 1940. They were associated with the Contemporary Mokuhanga movement.
Noriko Yanagisawa'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.
Noriko Yanagisawa's prints frequently feature figures.
