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Hina Aoyama
Hina Aoyama
Japan/France
Born in Yokohama, Japan, Hina Aoyama has been creating paper cuttings since 2000. Now living in France, Hina eschews traditional Japanese paper-cutting in order to focus on super-fine, lace-like cuttings that express concepts and imagery drawn from a host of cultural traditions. Aoyama works with traditional origami paper, cutting out minute details using very fine scissors and employing a meditative approach in forming her designs. Her subjects are drawn from sources as diverse as nature, including intricate flowers, butterflies, and the philosophy of Voltaire and the poetry of Baudelaire—whose words and sentences she cuts into her paper— although she admits to being inspired more by their lives than their literary creations. Through her paper art, she hopes to express the beauty of nature and a purity of life that (she feels) is often lost in contemporary culture.
Her process requires exquisite precision, as seen in the video below:
Eriko Horiki
Eriko Horiki
Japan
Eriko Horiki has found innovative ways to incorporate traditional washi into modern interior spaces. Having left a career in banking when she was in her twenties, Horiki began learning traditional washi paper-making, hoping not only to master the skill but to keep it alive for future generations. Working with a team of paper artisans and artists, she creates large-scale sheets of exquisitely textured mulberry paper whose intricate patterns are designed to catch the light. Her works are typically installed as features of architecture— ceilings, walls, room dividers, windows, lamps—in restaurants, hotel lobbies, and public spaces throughout Japan. Meticulously layered, tinted, and backlit to create specific moods and environments, Horiki’s paper sheets are a modern tribute to Japan’s traditional shoji screen doors and folding paper byobu screens. Her smaller-scale works mostly comprise paper sculptures that, like her large-scale sheets, are artfully illuminated to create distinctive atmospheres in specific architectural spaces.
The video below shows a team of paper laying out the fibers for her large scale paper:
Kyoko Ibe
Kyoko Ibe
Japan
Kyoko Ibe began working in traditional washi as a medium for contemporary art in the 1960s, a time when the material was confined to traditional Japanese arts and crafts. In the 1970s she won acclaim for her large-scale artworks, which pushed the limits of paper by combining traditional techniques with technological experimentation—such as recycling old handmade paper and handwritten documents into new washi. In these works, the ink of the original sources remains embedded in the paper, infusing the new work with gray shadows of the past. She also creates large-scale installations, a wide range of interior products, stage sets, and costumes, and has collaborated with many foreign theater groups. The beneficiary of numerous awards, Ibe was selected in 2009 to be a Cultural Ambassador by the Agency of Cultural Affairs of Japan. She is a professor at the Kyoto Institute of Technology and a director of the Japan Paper Academy.
The video below shows her process:
Yoshio Ikezaki
Yoshio Ikezaki
Japan/USA
Born in Kitakyushu, Japan, Yoshio Ikezaki earned his BA and MFA from Florida State University before returning to Japan to study traditional Japanese paper-making with the master papermakers Shigemi and Shigeyuki Matsuo. Since 1986, he has divided his time between the US and Japan, working as a washi artist and a professor of art in both countries. Ikezaki works with washi as both a painter and sculptor: in his sumi ink paintings, he creates mysterious, evocative landscapes that unify positive and negative space; in his sculpture, he layers handmade washi paper into abstract forms that express “his wish to capture a trace of the enormous energy collision that happens in nature.” Many of his sculptures, too, are infused with sumi ink, and resemble lava flows, ancient tree bark, or textured rock; others suggest ancient books on which inked Buddhist sutras, barely visible against the dyed paper, evoke Buddhist concepts of form and emptiness.
He describes his quiet repetitive work in this short interview below:
https://unframed.lacma.org/2017/10/18/conversation-artist-ikezaki-yoshio
Kakuko Ishii
Kakuko Ishii
Japan
Fiber artist Kakuko Ishii is based in Fukuoka, Japan, where she works as an artist, and recently retired from teaching at Kyushu Sangyo (Industrial) University. Since 1978, she has shown her work in fiber art exhibitions around the world, and has held several solo exhibitions throughout Japan and in Korea.
Most of Ishii’s works are fashioned from paper cords called mizuhiki, which are created by tightly winding rice paper and adding starch (to give it stiffness) and then the desired color. For many of her works, she weaves the cords together to create structure and form; but once she has shaped the base, she typically allows the cords the freedom to spread dynamically into abstract forms.
Her series called “Musubu” (to link, bind, or connect) uses knots for different meanings, such as wedding knots which are meant to last forever, or knots for birthday gifts meant to be unveiled. Her rice paper cords are strong enough to tie up the samurai warriors’ hair.
Yuko Kimura
Yuko Kimura
Japan/USA
Yuko Kimura was born in Oakland, California, and spent her childhood in Japan. Returning to the US in 1989, she received a BFA in printmaking from the Cleveland Institute of Art and an MFA in printmaking from the University of Michigan. For the last two decades, her printmaking has incorporated multiple processes, including etching, aquatint, and dyeing with indigo on pleated or twisted paper—mostly worm-eaten pages from old printed books or handmade washi papers made from kozo, gampi, and abaca fibers. She also incorporates worn fragments of cloth obtained from her grandmother in Japan, which she combines with newly-made sheets of paper and linen to form delicate, multilayered surfaces. Although Kimura’s use of aged paper and cloth can evoke a nostalgic, antique quality, her innovative printmaking practices focus intuitively in the present. For Kimura, transparency, form, and texture all take priority as she constructs her two- and three-dimensional patchwork experiments.
She has some excellent one-minute process videos that show how she makes paper and prints.
Yuko Nishimura
Yuko Nishimura
Japan
Yuko Nishimura graduated from the architectural design program at Nihon University in Tokyo and the Master’s Program in design at Tsukuba University. From her time as a student, she has been working with kyokushi, a special handmade paper, which she folds into conceptual reliefs and three-dimensional works that intersect the worlds of art, architecture, and fashion. For Nishimura, the act of folding paper holds special meaning that goes back over 1,000 years to ancient Japanese rituals. It also possesses a spiritual dimension: in Japanese, the word ori can mean both “fold” and “pray”; and kami can mean both “paper” and “god.” Embracing this spiritual quality, Nishimura creates designs that are at once subtle and dynamic in their interplay of form, light, and shadow. Her use of alternating “mountain” and “valley” folds produces dramatic geometric effects that (almost magically) evoke patterns of nature, such as ripples on the surface of water or dappled sunlight.
Nishimura says “In order to link the past with future generations regarding the form of folding, I do not limit myself to the category of origami but consider the pursuit of any possibility of folding paper. To express the Japanese soul through form will continue to be passed down from generation to generation as a tangency between culture and art.”
Sources:
https://thewallmagazine.wordpress.com/2014/07/22/we-are-talking-with-yuko-nishimura/, https://www.dariamag.com/home/washi-transformed
Takaaki Tanaka
Takaaki Tanaka
Japan
Takaaki Tanaka was born in Hyōgo prefecture, and graduated with a MFA from Tama Art University in Tokyo. He is currently an associate professor at the Kurashiki College of Apparel Arts, Okayama Prefecture.
He has exhibited his work in numerous exhibitions in Japan and overseas, including the New York City exhibitions Fiber Futures: Japan’s Textile Pioneers, at the Japan Society Gallery, and Paperworks: Material as Medium, at the Flinn Gallery. As an artist, Tanaka is interested in exploring the virtually infinite ways in which paper fiber can be manipulated to take on new forms inspired by the natural world. In several of his works, he has explored the concept of the nest, a fundamental starting point for many species of animal life. As Tanaka explains, “The shapes become emotional shapes that illustrate themes of nature, sense of touch and communication.”
Source:
https://browngrotta.com/artists/takaaki-tanaka
Ayomi Yoshida
Ayomi Yoshida
Japan
Ayomi Yoshida is the youngest artist in Japan’s renowned Yoshida family of artists. Although she originally studied architecture, she was eventually drawn to her family’s traditional medium of woodblock printing. For about two decades, she specialized in fairly traditional woodblock prints, but in the late 1990s she began pushing the limits of the art form—technically, geographically, and spatially—and is now best known for her room-sized installations of woodchips and for the thousands of tiny woodblock-printed details she has created for galleries and museums in Japan and the United States. Created primarily using paper, wood, and metal, Yoshida’s works evoke the fragility of nature and the impact of human behavior on the natural world.
You can see her traditional woodblock technique in this 45 second video:
She also enjoys creating installations and speaks about the process and meaning behind her Cherry Blossom installation in this link:
Meher McArthur
Meher McArthur
Curator
Los Angeles
Meher McArthur, the Gabrielle Jungels-Winkler Curator of Academic Programs and Collections at Scripps College, is a Los Angeles-based historian of Japanese art who also curated the IA&A traveling exhibitions Folding Paper: The Infinite Possibilities of Origami (2012-2016) and Above the Fold: New Expressions in Contemporary Origami Art (2015 -2020) and co-curated Nature, Tradition and Innovation: Japanese Ceramics from the Gordon Brodfuehrer Collection (2016-2019). Additionally, Ms. McArthur has published a wide variety of books relating to Asian art, including The Arts of Asia: A Guide to Materials, Techniques and Styles, Thames & Hudson, London and New York (2005); Reading Buddhist Art: An Illustrated Guide to Buddhist Signs and Symbols, Thames & Hudson, London and New York (2002); and Gods and Goblins: Japanese Folk Paintings from Otsu, Pacific Asia Museum, Pasadena (1999). Meher received an MA in Japanese Studies from Cambridge University; a postgraduate diploma in Asian Art from Sotheby’s School of Oriental Studies (SOAS), London University; and an MA in Art and Archaeology from SOAS, London University.
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