Modern Japanese Printmakers: New Waves and Eruptions

By Malene Wagner 

Prestel (2025)
ISBN-13: 978-3791377841

Review by Laurence Green

How much do you know about post World War 2 Japanese printmaking? If the answer is ‘Not a lot, but I want to learn more…’ then this luxe, visually arresting hardback volume definitely deserves a space in your bookshelf, capturing at a glance a movement that fuses exacting craftsmanship with fearless experimentation, in the process reinventing the very language of the print medium itself.

The message throughout is about countering expectations - we all have an image in our minds of what Japanese prints look like, maybe typified by something globally iconic like Hokusai’s The Great Wave, but this book utterly explodes those preconceptions from the off, bringing together an ample compendium of artists from the last hundred years whose work conveys a ceaseless urgency, daring, and creative spark.

With more than 100 breathtaking full-page reproductions, a story of radical reinvention unfolds. Some of the artists here synthesise tradition and modernity, while others opt for either sharp monochrome or eye-dazzling psychedelic colours. Conventions are well and truly shattered, and the overriding sense is one of both intense seriousness about the artform, but also a crucial playfulness. There’s also much to lap up here about the parallels and connections between Japanese printmakers of this era, and parallel movements in the pop art / fine art space in mid-century America, for example (think Andy Warhol, etc.).

Not everything here will be to everyone’s tastes - the kaleidoscopic rainbow-like work by Ay-O that graces the cover might feel like the height of hip modernity to one viewer, for example, but come on as an overpowering assault on the senses for another. But then, that’s where the variety on offer across all the artists collected here wins out - and I imagine readers will be hard pressed not to find at least something they personally enjoy here.

This is a classy production - the epitome of a luxe coffee table publication if ever there was one. The paper feels rich and high quality, perfectly capturing the colour palette and tones of the prints; they leap from the page with a cleanliness and verve that instantly dispel any preconceptions readers might have of print-making as something arcane or somehow 'lesser' than painted works. This is serious stuff, and the variety of material shown here is matched only by the impressive sense of printmaking as a lived tradition - the theme coming through again and again of a sense of lineage, past masters passing on the skills to new generations, who each in turn then pass it on to others.

If I were to offer some criticisms - it is that the book can feel a little too much like a compendium at times; the introductory text accompanying each artist is largely biographical - and no doubt for reasons of space - can only afford minimal critical analysis to individual works themselves. All the key salient facts are here, backed up by profuse references, but this can leave the book feeling like a springboard for future research at times, rather than a definitive catalogue. A couple of eloquent essays or thematic box-outs interspersed into the biographies would have helped vary the tone a great deal, and it’s telling that the most interesting bios are of those still-living artists that the author personally interviewed themselves.

It's worth noting that the book also stretches to include artists not known primarily as printmakers - and while their works are absolutely valid as part of the broader mission of the volume, it can feel a touch jarring to see global art megastars like Ruth Asawa, Yayoi Kusama and Yoshitomo Nara positioned directly next to artists dedicated purely to the print medium, and largely unknown outside of a connoisseur audience.

With the current Samurai exhibition in the British Museum, Japanese prints are front and centre before a sizeable paying public here in the UK again, following swiftly on the heels of the Hiroshige exhibit in the same venue last year. This book offers a much needed sequel, as it were, to lay forth plainly and clearly that Japanese printmaking, both in the traditional woodblock medium, but also utilising other techniques like silkscreen, does not belong only in the past. Rather, the vibrancy and range it can offer has ensured its relevancy as a living practice on into modern times. Seen as part of wider trajectories of graphics, cartooning, design work and fine art, the spectacle of the Japanese “print” as object continues to enthral, and this book offers one of the most vital surveys of the medium to date.