Yuichi Hasegawa

Yuichi Hasegawa was a Japanese woodblock printmaker whose luminous, layered prints drew on Zen spirituality and the vast patterns of the natural cosmos. Born in 1945 in Aizu Wakamatsu, Fukushima Prefecture, Hasegawa came from a family of lacquer artisans, a heritage that would profoundly influence his artistic technique and aesthetic sensibility.

Hasegawa began printmaking in 1970 under the guidance of Kiyoshi Saito, the renowned woodblock master who was also a native of Aizu. Under Saito's mentorship, Hasegawa developed a distinctive approach to the medium that would set him apart from virtually all other contemporary printmakers. Rather than carving separate blocks for each color in the traditional manner, Hasegawa worked with a single block that he carved, printed, and progressively effaced through ten to twenty successive stages until he achieved his ideal image. This reduction technique meant that each edition was truly limited, as the block was largely destroyed in the printing process. Most of his editions numbered eight to ten copies, rarely exceeding twenty.

Hasegawa's family background in lacquerwork gave him an intuitive understanding of surface quality and luminosity. He incorporated lacquer resin into his printing process to add a distinctive gleam to his works, and used oil-based inks that created a rich, tactile surface with beautifully defined color and metallic effects. He printed on soft handmade paper, which he often reinforced with additional papers or by applying persimmon juice to the reverse, a technique borrowed from fabric dyeing artisans.

Drawing on the deep spirituality of Zen Buddhism, Hasegawa described his artistic vision in terms of the immense time and space of the universe arranged like a Buddhist mandala, a theme he explored alongside the various forms of creation observed in nature. He established his studio in an abandoned schoolhouse in rural Aizu, surrounded by the landscapes that inspired his contemplative imagery of moons, flowers, and cosmic forms.

Saito brought Hasegawa to the attention of the Tolman Collection gallery in the late 1980s, launching a decades-long collaboration that included numerous solo exhibitions between 1989 and 2017. Hasegawa received the Grand Prize at the Fukushima Art Festival in 1981 and the Museum Director's Prize in 1987. He exhibited widely in Japan and internationally, including shows in Cairo, Egypt, and Retretti, Finland, and participated in the CWAJ Print Show in Tokyo annually from 1990.

His works are held in the permanent collections of the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, the Art Gallery of New South Wales, the National Museum of Singapore, the Cincinnati Art Museum, the Museum of Arts and Crafts in Hamburg, and the Rockefeller Collection. Hasegawa died on August 2, 2025, at the age of eighty.