COLLECTING JAPANESE PRINTS FEATURED CONTEMPORARY ARTIST

1913 - 1979

Profile at a Glance:

• Utagawa School Ukiyo-e artist

• Produced some of the most iconic landscape designs in Ukiyo-e; also created kacho-e

• Hoeido Tokaido was his first landscape series executed and is considered his first masterpiece

• Produced several different Tokaido series

• One Hundred Famous Views of Edo was his last series; considered among his best work

Hoshi Joichi was a contemporary Japanese artist born in 1913 in rural Niigata Prefecture. After graduating from the Tainan Normal School, Hoshi worked as a teacher in Taiwan for thirteen years before returning to Japan in 1941 at the onset of WWII. 

Three years after the cessation of the Pacific War, Hoshi exhibited with Nihon Hanga Kyokai and became a formal member in 1952. During this period, he also exhibited with Kokugakai and the Graphic Arts Club. Although he enjoyed creating unique works of art, Hoshi also wanted to further his education. He enrolled in the Painting department of the Musashino College of Fine Arts in Tokyo and graduated in 1956 at the age of forty-three. 

Entirely self-taught in mokuhan, Hoshi was most attracted to the universal elements of nature and produced large, elegantly carved images of stars and constellations throughout the 1960s. As his fame and reputation grew, he was represented at the Tokyo Biennales of 1960, 1962, and 1964, and the Sao Paulo Biennale of 1967. During his later years, Hoshi focused on images of brightly colored, wizened trees in a tangle of branches and gnarled knots. His intricate web of branches achieves a rather stately grandeur, which is enhanced by his bold point-of-view. The composition of such pieces, horizontally elongated, recall the shape of a traditional six-fold screen, and could almost be a sketch for a nihonga painting (Treescape E., 1975 is an excellent example). 

Overall, Hoshi's intensified work, investing the subjects with his own feelings as he approached old age, is both stoic and awe-inspiring. The artist continued to produce prints until his death in 1979 at the age of sixty-six.