Katsutoshi Yuasa. “Summer Snow.” 2022. ed. 2/3. Oil-based woodcut on paper. 78.75” x 118“. Ronin Gallery. JPR-210057.

Measuring 6-feet high by nearly 10-feet wide, Katsutoshi Yuasa’s woodblock print “Summer Snow'' places the viewer among the treetops, immersing them in a quiet snowfall. The monumental scale of the piece fills the field of vision, enveloping the viewer in the landscape, while Yuasa’s use of depth draws them deep within the scene. Pale dots blur in the immediate foreground like snowflakes falling from one’s eyelashes, while pine boughs fade into abstraction in the distance. This oil-based woodblock print is the largest woodblock print to come through the Ronin Gallery collection. The piece took over a year to create as Yuasa worked from the initial photograph, through the carving process, and finally to the printing of three impressions. In 2022, “Summer Snow” was featured in Yuasa’s solo exhibition Seeing Through the Light held at the Franz Gertsch Museum in Switzerland. The following year, it returned to Japan for exhibition at the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa. Ronin Gallery is pleased to feature this staggering print as part of the online exhibition Snowfall.

Born in Tokyo in 1978, Katsutoshi Yuasa is a contemporary woodblock print artist. His work presents a conversation between the contemporaneity of photography and the tradition of woodblock printmaking. Each Yuasa woodblock print begins with his own digital photographs, which he then reinterprets as woodblock prints. In his words, the camera creates “fictional two-dimensional information in the surface…I have decided to use the woodcut technique as a way of adapting the subjective perception to the objective fiction.” This interplay between the emotional and the factual is neither reality nor fiction: Katsutoshi Yuasa creates a "neutral space…in a new dimension." Yuasa received a BA in Fine Arts from Musashino Art University in 2002, where he studied painting and printmaking. He continued his study of printmaking in London, earning a MFA from the Royal College of Art in 2005. From MI-LAB to Musashino Art University, Yuasa has taught, lectured and led workshops throughout Europe and Asia. He has received numerous awards and scholarships, including Grand Prize at the 2015 CWAJ 60th Anniversary Print Show, and was named the 2017 Ronin|Globus Artist-in-residence. He actively exhibits in solo and group shows worldwide and his work can be found in the permanent collections of prestigious institutions such as the Victoria & Albert Museum, the Cleveland Museum of Art, and the New York Public Library.

Want to explore more of Katsutoshi Yuasa’s contemporary woodblock prints? Follow this link to visit his artist page.