Biography
Yasu Shibata (柴田泰, born 1968 in Osaka, Japan) is a master printer and printmaker whose career has been built at the working centre of contemporary American fine-art editioning, and whose introduction of traditional Japanese woodblock (mokuhanga) technique into the print-publishing programme of Pace Editions in New York is one of the principal contemporary instances of the medium's translation into the apparatus of a major Western print house. The brief data that places his birth year at 1943 is incorrect; gallery, museum, and Pace Editions documentation consistently records 1968. He received his BFA from Kyoto Seika University, the Kyoto art school that has functioned across the past four decades as Japan's principal training environment for international mokuhanga practitioners, and studied printmaking there under the senior sōsaku-hanga printmaker Akira Kurosaki (1936–2019), whose advocacy of water-based woodblock in international forums did much to establish the contemporary revival's intellectual framework. After completing his BFA he emigrated to the United States in 1991 and began his American printing career at Tyler Graphics, the Mount Kisco workshop run by Kenneth Tyler that across the 1980s and 1990s was the leading American fine-art print publisher and where Shibata worked on editions for Frank Stella, David Salle, Helen Frankenthaler, and other Tyler regulars. He subsequently joined Pace Editions in New York as a master printer, the position he has held since the early 2000s, and at Pace he established a dedicated mokuhanga workshop in which the multi-block, water-based, baren-impressed Japanese method is used to produce editions for the Pace artists. His best-documented Pace projects include James Turrell (woodblock editions made from 2016 onward, derived from Turrell's Skyspace and Roden Crater colour studies), Chuck Close (mokuhanga editions of grid-derived portrait images requiring as many as twelve to twenty hand-cut blocks and up to seventy-three individual colours per impression), James Siena (highly patterned compositions in which the additive-overprint discipline of mokuhanga is used to produce the dense optical surface characteristic of Siena's work), Yoshitomo Nara, Jonas Wood, and Maurice Payne. Alongside his work as an editioning printer he produces a body of his own original prints that combine the Japanese woodcut method with the reduction technique borrowed from late twentieth-century Western relief printmaking — building intense saturated colour from successive impressions of progressively reduced shapes — and these have been shown internationally, including a 2016 solo exhibition at Foundry Vineyards in Walla Walla, Washington, organized in partnership with the Whitman College Mokuhanga Center. He teaches relief printing at the Cooper Union School of Art in New York and is a regular workshop leader at the Mokuhanga Project Space in Walla Walla. His work is held in the collections of the New York Public Library, the Cleveland Museum of Art, and the Smith College Museum of Art, among others, and is represented commercially by Pace Prints and Aspinwall Editions. He is, in the present state of the published record, the most institutionally embedded Japanese-born mokuhanga master printer working in the United States, and his projects at Pace are the principal contemporary instances in which the Japanese woodblock method has been used at the top tier of the American contemporary print market for editions by major Western artists.
Key Facts
- Active Period
- 1968
- Nationality
- 🇯🇵Japan
- Movement
- Contemporary Mokuhanga
- Subjects
- Abstract
- Works Indexed
- 3
Frequently Asked Questions
Yasu Shibata (柴田泰, born 1968 in Osaka, Japan) is a master printer and printmaker whose career has been built at the working centre of contemporary American fine-art editioning, and whose introduction of traditional Japanese woodblock (mokuhanga) technique into the print-publishing programme of Pace Editions in New York is one of the principal contemporary instances of the medium's translation into the apparatus of a major Western print house. The brief data that places his birth year at 1943 is incorrect; gallery, museum, and Pace Editions documentation consistently records 1968. He received his BFA from Kyoto Seika University, the Kyoto art school that has functioned across the past four decades as Japan's principal training environment for international mokuhanga practitioners, and studied printmaking there under the senior sōsaku-hanga printmaker Akira Kurosaki (1936–2019), whose advocacy of water-based woodblock in international forums did much to establish the contemporary revival's intellectual framework. After completing his BFA he emigrated to the United States in 1991 and began his American printing career at Tyler Graphics, the Mount Kisco workshop run by Kenneth Tyler that across the 1980s and 1990s was the leading American fine-art print publisher and where Shibata worked on editions for Frank Stella, David Salle, Helen Frankenthaler, and other Tyler regulars. He subsequently joined Pace Editions in New York as a master printer, the position he has held since the early 2000s, and at Pace he established a dedicated mokuhanga workshop in which the multi-block, water-based, baren-impressed Japanese method is used to produce editions for the Pace artists. His best-documented Pace projects include James Turrell (woodblock editions made from 2016 onward, derived from Turrell's Skyspace and Roden Crater colour studies), Chuck Close (mokuhanga editions of grid-derived portrait images requiring as many as twelve to twenty hand-cut blocks and up to seventy-three individual colours per impression), James Siena (highly patterned compositions in which the additive-overprint discipline of mokuhanga is used to produce the dense optical surface characteristic of Siena's work), Yoshitomo Nara, Jonas Wood, and Maurice Payne. Alongside his work as an editioning printer he produces a body of his own original prints that combine the Japanese woodcut method with the reduction technique borrowed from late twentieth-century Western relief printmaking — building intense saturated colour from successive impressions of progressively reduced shapes — and these have been shown internationally, including a 2016 solo exhibition at Foundry Vineyards in Walla Walla, Washington, organized in partnership with the Whitman College Mokuhanga Center. He teaches relief printing at the Cooper Union School of Art in New York and is a regular workshop leader at the Mokuhanga Project Space in Walla Walla. His work is held in the collections of the New York Public Library, the Cleveland Museum of Art, and the Smith College Museum of Art, among others, and is represented commercially by Pace Prints and Aspinwall Editions. He is, in the present state of the published record, the most institutionally embedded Japanese-born mokuhanga master printer working in the United States, and his projects at Pace are the principal contemporary instances in which the Japanese woodblock method has been used at the top tier of the American contemporary print market for editions by major Western artists.
Yasu Shibata was active born in 1968. They were associated with the Contemporary Mokuhanga movement.
Yasu Shibata'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.
Yasu Shibata's prints frequently feature abstract.
Yasu Shibata 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.
