Seiko Kawachi

Seiko Kawachi

Born in Yamanashi Prefecture in 1948, Seiko Kawachi is a pioneering printmaker whose career has been defined by the pursuit of scale, technique, and expressive force in contemporary woodblock printing. A graduate of the Oil Painting Department of Tama Art University (1973), Kawachi initially trained as a painter before turning decisively toward printmaking, a shift that would shape more than five decades of artistic practice. From early in his career, he demonstrated a singular sensibility—one that merges traditional Japanese woodblock processes with a bold, graphic energy rooted in modern visual culture.

Kawachi first came to national attention in 1970 with the New Printers Prize at the Japan Print Association Exhibition, and his rapid ascent continued with the Grand Prix at the same exhibition in 1976. Over the following decades, he went on to receive many of the highest distinctions in Japanese and international printmaking, including major prizes from the Hyogo Prefectural Museum of Modern Art, the International Young Artists’ Exhibition, the International Triennial of Original Colored Graphics in Grenchen, the Norwegian International Print Biennial, the Biella International Competition, and the Osaka International Print Triennial. His practice expanded globally in 1985 when he studied for a year at Columbia University in New York as a Cultural Affairs Agency overseas trainee, during which he also lectured widely on Japanese woodblock techniques.

Renowned for his large-scale woodblock prints, Kawachi developed a signature visual language that incorporates imagery from Hokusai’s Great Wave as a dramatic backdrop for his recurring motif of flying chickens—an unexpected pairing that embodies the tension between tradition and imagination that runs throughout his work. Across a long and decorated career, he has exhibited internationally and is represented in leading museums worldwide, including the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo; the British Museum; the Cleveland Museum of Art; the Library of Congress; the Portland Art Museum; the Art Gallery of New South Wales; and the Kaohsiung Museum of Fine Arts. Kawachi’s contributions to the field have also been recognized with major civic honors, such as Japan’s Medal of the Purple Ribbon (2011) and Medal of the Blue Ribbon (2014), affirming his standing as one of the most influential figures in contemporary printmaking.