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Gen Yamaguchi didn’t always function as an artist. Born into a wealthy family in 1896 in Japan’s Shizuoka Prefecture, Yamaguchi joined a society that renounced materialism at a young age, and its teachings included walking door-to-door offering menial labor in exchange for food. For Yamaguchi, it was a form of spiritual purification.
On one of these visits, Yamaguchi’s group happened to knock on the door of Koshiro Onchi, a renowned printmaker and a foundational leader of the sosaku hanga (creative print) movement. The sosaku hanga was a new generation of artists who, starting in the 20th century, broke away from the ukiyo-e style of printmaking which often portrayed nature and leisure scenes. Instead of dividing the labor of print production across multiple craftspeople, sosaku hanga artists designed, carved and printed works of art themselves. These artists often used new techniques and materials in their creative process and incorporated abstract imagery.
After their chance meeting, Onchi mentored Yamaguchi. Both were core members of the Ichimokukai, or First Thursday Society—an organization of woodblock printmakers, led by Onchi, who convened on the first Thursday of every month from 1939 through 1955.
Yamaguchi’s spirituality and renunciation of materialism still found its way into his artistic practice. His compositions frequently incorporate found objects. For example, Yamaguchi pressed a cedar board from a fence to create an impression for his 1958 work Noh Actor, with the wood’s grain and knots happening to look like a face in profile.
Yamaguchi’s Noh Actor is now featured in “The Print Generation,” a new exhibition running through April 27, 2025, at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Asian Art. The exhibition explores sosaku hanga artists and the creative process they formed within dramatic political and societal changes in Japan during and after World War II, from imperialism to wartime scarcity to an accelerated amount of international interaction.
Yamaguchi’s Noh Actor is a particular favorite of the exhibition’s curator Kit Brooks, now the curator of Asian art at the Princeton University Art Museum. Brooks appreciates the “delicious chance” of Yamaguchi randomly meeting Onchi, and the serendipity that Yamaguchi would find an object that, when pressed, resembles a Noh theater actor’s wooden mask. For Brooks, the work is proof that both sosaku hanga and contemporary artists can create using only what’s around them.
“I want people to make more art,” Brooks says. “You don’t have to have fancy materials. You don’t have to have a studio of craftspeople at your disposal. These are things that you can make with things that you can find.”
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When Brooks joined the National Museum of Asian Art around 2019, the museum had recently acquired over 2,000 prints from the Kenneth and Kiyo Hitch Collection. Brooks thought showcasing the sosaku hanga prints from this collection would give viewers a unique look into a specific group of artists, ones who fought for printmakers to be seen as legitimate artists in the mid-20th century.
“This art form wasn’t really recognized at the time in the art world,” Brooks says. “All of these artists in the 1930s until the mid-’40s, nobody was professionally supporting themselves by making these prints. Everybody had their jobs and they were really struggling to get recognition for this art form.”
Onchi’s leadership with the Ichimokukai was pivotal in collectivizing printmakers, having them support each other at a time when much of the Japanese population was starving because of World War II rationing. The group provided deep friendship and artistic support. As works in “The Print Generation” demonstrate, artists even created prints portraying each other. Onchi helped forge a new generation of printmakers who were able to advocate for themselves, particularly on an economic front. This included marketing themselves particularly to Europeans and Americans, who had increased contact with Japan because of their wartime occupation.
Alicia Volk, a scholar of Japanese art at the University of Maryland, says that hundreds of thousands of American soldiers were stationed in Tokyo and throughout Japan in the few months after the war. Savvy artists identified these soldiers as customers, with prints being good souvenirs because they were cheaper to manufacture and easy to transport. American patrons also didn’t carry some of the cultural expectations that previous generations of Japanese patrons did.
“In Japan, the market for prints was never very large,” Volk says, adding that when Japanese people did buy prints, those pieces tended to be more conventional. “Onchi, because of these new patrons, began to have a freedom to explore artistically those interests that otherwise he couldn’t have pursued. His American patrons were the ones who encouraged him to work at a larger format, using a different kind of very interesting printing techniques that Onchi hadn’t used before.”
Volk also notes that Onchi was drawn to printmaking because of its tension between mastery and spontaneity; finished prints might never be perfectly in tune with an artist’s vision.
“Onchi liked the print because you had to fully be in the moment, and you couldn’t hide any mistakes,” Volk says. “So, it required him to have a type of control in a situation where there was also the element of a lack of control, of chance.”
Sosaku hanga print artists also often used innovative methods. Sumio Kawakami mixed glycerin into his ink to give it a shiny surface, helping aesthetically reflect the neon lights, imported objects and department stores that were spreading throughout Japan at the time.
Lillian Wies, a research assistant for “The Print Generation” and a curatorial fellow in East Asian art at the Harvard Art Museums, points to Water Reflection by Reika Iwami as an example of how creative print artists adapted established printmaking techniques to fit more abstract sensibilities and subject matter.
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The work “employs a special technique of using mica powder throughout the print,” Wies says. “It has this really glittery effect, but [Iwami]’s doing it all in matte black. So it looks very modern, even though it’s a technique that has a very long history … she’s using all of these older techniques, but really modernizing them in a way that is very singular to her. All of her prints, you can tell immediately that she’s doing them.”
Iwami was a co-founder of the Joryu Hanga Kyokai, the Women’s Print Association. Although some women joined the Ichimokukai, the Joryu Hanga Kyokai was dedicated specifically to providing opportunities for women artists.
In fact, some printmakers (not featured in “The Print Generation”) opposed the Ichimokukai’s values, despite their connections to each other. The beginning of the Cold War created a divide in Japan between people who were either for or against communism. Volk defines artists for communism as the jinmin hanga (people’s print) movement. Artists such as such as Kenji Suzuki, Hiroharu Nii, Jiro Takidaira and Nobuya Iino were more supportive of communist beliefs, and they used their artwork to support their politics. Volk stresses that Onchi wasn’t necessarily more conservative, but he did have anti-communist patrons and was concerned about politics and art combining after heavy censorship from the Japanese government during the war.
“Onchi, like other artists working in other media, believed it was very important to protect art from the incursion of politics, the encroachment,” Volk says, and for art not to be manipulated for political ends. “For Onchi, it was important to use art to artistic ends.”
Still, Brooks and Wies emphasize that the works featured in their exhibition do speak to the politics of the time. Onchi’s 1946 print Cherry Blossom Time portrays a woman in a traditional Japanese kimono reaching up toward pink cherry blossoms. In a digital interactive for the piece, Wies notes that it exemplifies a traditional view of women and the past, writing “Onchi used the female figure to communicate the stability of continuity after a period of intense change.” This nostalgic imagery wasn’t only influenced by a Western audience: Japan itself actively promoted it.
“They were worried about colonial incursions, worried about becoming colonized by then dominant Euro-American powers,” Wies adds. “As a way to combat that, they used art in particular as a form of soft diplomacy, to prove a very long history of cultural sophistication that was distinct from Euro-America.”
Brooks says that people viewing the image in the 1940s may have interpreted it “as a very benign image of traditional things,” and there’s still an impulse today to only appreciate the superficial beauty of the print and not the political context of it.
“There are often people who just want to say, ‘It’s a woman in a kimono,’ or, ‘It’s a Japanese castle,’ who really want to hold onto the idea that these images are neutral, and that persists today,” Brooks says. “So it is always interesting the level of investment in people wanting to believe the artwork is apolitical.”
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“The Print Generation” and other exhibitions allow for contemplation about how art is created, and how it becomes emblematic of many historical periods and places. Volk recently collaborated with University of Maryland students to create the complementary exhibition “Onchi Koshiro, Graphic Artist: Picturing Postwar Japan,” drawing from 150 items that highlight Onchi’s book designs and illustrations created from 1945–1949 during the Allied occupation of Japan. Volk says her students helped her see the works “with new eyes,” calling her attention to Onchi’s interest in teaching children. Working with students allows them to view the objects through a past and present lens, she adds.
“The interesting thing about the Maryland collection is that the collection itself was formed under the conditions of American empire and control, military occupation,” Volk says. “I think in our own day, we are thinking about hard questions of occupation in various parts of the world. And that might be something new that an audience would bring to the material.”
Wies hopes to intervene into peoples’ assumptions or preconceptions about Japan.
“A thing that often gets said to me is, ‘I don’t like the modern period because it doesn’t feel Japanese anymore,’” says Wies. While she doesn’t agree with that statement, she does think it prompts a deeper discussion about how to classify Japanese art—and if things like the borders of modern nations are even relevant.
“There does seem to be this impulse to sequester Japan and Japanese art as separate from the rest of the world, which just isn’t the case,” she says. “It’s never been the case. Japan has always been part of artistic movement across borders and across time.”
“The Print Generation” will be on view at the National Museum of Asian Art through April 27, 2025.