Yuji Hiratsuka

Yuji Hiratsuka (平塚雄二, born 1954) is a Japanese-born printmaker and educator who has built a distinguished career bridging Eastern and Western printmaking traditions. Based in the United States since the mid-1980s, Hiratsuka creates prints that draw on both his Japanese artistic heritage and his engagement with Western modernist aesthetics, resulting in a body of work that occupies a distinctive position in contemporary international printmaking.

Born in Osaka, Japan, in 1954, Hiratsuka earned a bachelor's degree in art education from Tokyo Gakugei University in Tokyo, which he attended from 1973 to 1978. He moved to the United States in 1985 and pursued advanced printmaking training there, completing a Master of Arts at New Mexico State University in 1987 and a Master of Fine Arts in printmaking at Indiana University in 1990. It was in the United States that he developed the intaglio-based technique that would come to define his mature work.

Hiratsuka settled in Oregon, joining the faculty of the Department of Art at Oregon State University in Corvallis, where he taught for many years and was later named a Distinguished Professor of Art. He established himself as an influential teacher and mentor within the American printmaking community while continuing to develop his own artistic practice.

Hiratsuka's signature prints are made through a layered, labour-intensive process built on intaglio etching rather than traditional woodblock. He prepares multiple copper plates and prints successive layers of colour — often black, yellow, red, and blue — frequently incorporating chine-collé, and finishes many works with a relief overprint that heightens their visual intensity. The result is a densely worked surface that fuses the Western intaglio tradition with the flat, graphic sensibility of Japanese prints. His compositions typically centre on stylized human figures with mask-like, ukiyo-e-inflected faces, rendered with wit and a theatrical sense of play, recombining motifs drawn from Japanese visual culture with a modern, sometimes surreal sensibility that reflects his bicultural perspective.

A recurring theme in Hiratsuka's work is the dialogue between tradition and modernity, East and West, the handmade and the mechanical. His prints assert the physical presence of the print as a handmade object — through the grain of the block, the collaged papers of chine-collé, and layers of translucent colour — even as they explore conceptual and imaginative territory. This tension between craft and concept gives his work an intellectual rigour that has earned him recognition in both the fine-art and printmaking worlds.

Hiratsuka has exhibited extensively in the United States, Japan, and internationally, and his prints are held in public collections including the British Museum, the Portland Art Museum, the Library of Congress, the New York Public Library, and the Cleveland Museum of Art, among others.