Chosei Kawakami

• Name — Sumio Kawakami • Native Name — 川上澄生 • Occupation — Painter • Born — 10 April 1895 • Birthplace — Yokohama, Japan • Died — 1 September 1972 • Place of death — Utsunomiya, Japan

Kawakami was born in Yokohama, but his family moved to Tokyo when he was three. He learned to draw from Shôdai Tameshige (1863-1951) at the Aoyama Junior High School (Aoyama Gakuin Chûtôbu). He made his first print in 1912: and adaptation of a frontispiece drawn by the playwright Mokutarô Kinoshita (木下杢太郎 1885-1945) for a play called "Izumiya Dyeing Shop" (Izumiya somemono-ten: 和泉屋染物店). He was quite inventive: To make his print — a woman with a traditional chignon hair-style who peers out from underneath a Western umbrella — Kawakami used a sharpened umbrella stay to carve the block. Moreover, he printed the inked block with a makeshift rubbing tool — an ashtray wrapped in a handkerchief. Notwithstanding the limits of such improvised tools, the resulting image already captured what would prove to be Kawakami's lifelong theme: the curious, often amusing combination of people and objects from East and West within a single image. Kawakami was fascinated by the amusing encounters and bizarre misunderstandings that occurred when the first foreigners arrived in Japan, an interest reflected in many of his prints. He started to submit his works to a local journals starting from 1913. His mother, Koshige (小繁), died in 1915; probably because of this event he decided to move to Canada in 1917. He spent a year in Canada and the US, working at various jobs, that included a salmon cannery in Alaska and house painting in Seattle. He returned to Japan in 1918, when he learned that his younger brother, Washirô (和四郎), was dying. In Japan he worked for a time in an export firm; in 1921 he found a position as an English teacher at Tochigi Prefectural Utsunomiya Junior High School (Utsunomiya Chûgakkô: 宇都宮中学校) in Kantô region. Kawakami's first "self-drawn, self-carved, self-printed" (jiga-jikoku-jizuri: 自画自刻自摺) book made in the "creative-print" (sôsaku hanga; 創作版画) manner was published in 1927. It was a collection of his poetry and woodcuts, titled "Bluebeard" (Aohige: 青髯). He then created more than 30 other books of woodcuts, which he mostly printed by himself. It was during this period, teaching in his free hours, that he began to devote himself in earnest to printmaking: he became a member of several sōsaku hanga associations, exhibiting regularly with them and producing ichimai-e prints as well as the more than thirty limited-edition books, mostly self-carved and self-printed. Although he exhibited with the Nihon Hanga Kyōkai from the early 1920s, he knew relatively few print artists and was never much influenced by them. Kawakami also admired the art and poetry of Yumeji Takehisa, and befriended other sōsaku hanga artists as he discovered their work through the various art societies he joined, becoming a member of the Kokuga Sōsaku Kyōkai in 1925 and of the Nihon Sōsaku Hanga Kyōkai in 1929, and a founding member of the Nihon Hanga Kyōkai in 1931. He was also involved in the publication and management of several dōjin zasshi (coterie magazines) promoting sōsaku hanga, including Shi to Hanga, Kaze, Han Geijutsu, Shiro to Kuro and Kitsutsuki. • Illustration — Yoru no Ginza ("Ginza at Night": 夜の銀座), part of the One Hundred Views of New Tokyo series, 1929 • Illustration — "Torii of Kudan", part of the One Hundred Views of New Tokyo, 1945 In the early years, he developed a personal movable-type method for printing the texts by carving around 800 ideographs on individual small blocks of cherry wood (sakura: 桜 or 櫻), arranging the blocks within wood frames, and printing them with a traditional round rubbing pad (baren: 馬楝), just as he would do with his woodcut images. Kawakami said he was mostly self-taught, though he had attended an art school in his childhood. His early woodcuts were made in the usual manner, "carving multiple blocks for the outlines and colors. He then adopted a method of carving only the keyblock while brushing on colors by hand." Besides of this, he frequently visited the workshop of Gôda Kiyoshi (合田清 1862-1938), who was skilled both in traditional woodcuts European techniques. (Gôda's son, Koichi 弘一, was a classmate of Kawakami's at Aoyama Gakuin High School.) Oliver Statler quoted Kawakami saying: "I was never much in the swim of things as far as prints were concerned. Since I didn't live in Tokyo I never knew many of the print artists and never was much influenced by them. I've just gone my own way, doing what interested me, and hoping it would interest somebody else. If it has, I'm happy." Kawakami was against Japanese militarism; during the Second World War he lost his job as the Ministry of Education banned the teaching of English language in schools. His main income at the time was from the sale of his books. "Former students also helped out financially, but he was reduced to burning his carved blocks for firewood." Kawakami moved in March 1945 to his wife Chiyo's (千代) home in Hokkaidô (北海道), "shortly before the Allied bombings began on April 18"; Hokkaidô was serving as an evacuation area at that time. In 1949 he resumed to teach English at Utsunomiya Girls' High School. In 1951 he, together with his students, started an art magazine called "Dull Blade" (Dontô: 鈍刀). In 1958 the Nihon Mingei Kyōkai exhibited two hundred of his works, further increasing recognition of his art. In the 1960s Kawakami finally achieved the wider, belated recognition that had long eluded him, followed by retrospective exhibitions in 1974 and 1975. Among his last prints was Tokei to Ranpu (1971), commissioned by the Hotta Corporation to commemorate the 95th anniversary of its watch shop; the print was published in collaboration with the Kokugakai on paper made by Ichibei Iwano VIII. There is a Kawakami Sumio Graphic Art Museum in Kanuma, Tochigi prefecture (Kanuma Shiritsu Kawakami Sumio Bijutsukan: 鹿沼市立川上澄生美術館), established in 1992. The museum building was inspired by one of Kawakami's prints. There are more than 2000 works in its collection, donated Hasegawa Katsusaburô (長谷川勝三郎 1912-2001).

Chosei Kawakami is recorded as painter, printmaker, illustrator, engraver and artist.