Tracing Light and Texture: The Printmaking Genius of Tokio MIYASHITA
- hilarytolman
- Jun 1
- 3 min read
There’s something about Miyashita’s work that invites one to pause. His prints are textured meditations - layers of color, wire, and memory - all assembled with reverent precision.
Miyashita-san (1930–2011) was one of the first artists whose work my parents handled. He became an adoptive uncle to both my sister and me, always interested in whatever we had going on, and a cheerful, chatty guide for my entire family into the world of contemporary works on paper which my parents were just beginning to navigate. His wife knit shawls for various family members to mitigate the chill of the old Japanese house where we lived and where the first Tolman Collection gallery was housed, and Miyashita-san showed up one day to hand build all of the bookcases needed to accommodate my mother's extensive book collection. He loved a good time and was a jovial, genial presence at many an exhibition opening, cocktail and dinner party.
Born in 1930 in Tokyo, Miyashita came of age during a turbulent time in Japan. The post-war era shaped a generation of artists who sought to balance the traditional with the modern, the local with the global. For Miyashita, this balancing act became his artistic language. Though he first studied literature, it was under the mentorship of Un’ichi Hiratsuka and Jun’ichirō Sekino - both pillars of the sōsaku hanga (creative prints) movement - that he found his voice in printmaking. What emerged from his studio was work that felt simultaneously ancient and modern, technical and emotional.
What sets Miyashita apart is his marriage of two seemingly incompatible methods: the delicate water-based woodblock printing of traditional Japanese practice, and the gritty, Western technique of intaglio, where etched metal plates and ink create bold contrasts. But Miyashita didn't just combine them - he brought them to life. His technique involved soldering wires onto zinc plates to carve his intaglio lines, laying them like a net over the highly saturated, mostly autumnal colors of his woodblock backgrounds. The result was something visually tactile - prints that look as though you could run your fingers over them and feel the wire, the grain of the paper, the ridges of the ink.
His imagery, too, strikes a delicate balance. One moment you seem to be looking out of a car window across a dusky landscape in Nature (1974), feeling the hush of twilight on a rural road. The next, you’re drawn into an abstract swirl of historical fragments, as in Where It All Began (1976), a piece that merges American revolutionary war iconography with Japanese aesthetic restraint (frontispiece to this post), a piece that was one of six by various artists in a US bicentennial themed print portfolio that my parents commissioned. There’s a quiet complexity in his work - a sense that you’re witnessing a conversation between cultures, time periods, even emotional states.
Miyashita was not only a creator but also a teacher. In the 1990s, he taught at Tokyo University of Art and Education, where he passed on his deep respect for craft and experimentation. He was widely exhibited during his lifetime, from São Paulo to Ljubljana to Seattle, and his works are now housed in museums like MoMA and the British Museum - proof that his voice resonated far beyond Japan.
What makes Miyashita’s work so enduring isn't just his technical innovation, though that's certainly part of it. It’s the way he captured a world of stillness and movement in each print. His work reminds us that art can be both quiet and radical – that, in a scratch of metal or through a specific palette of colors, a whole life can be told.
