吉田克朗

Yoshida Katsurō was born in 1943 in Fukaya City, Saitama Prefecture, the youngest of four siblings. The painter Hanazaki Mamoru was his homeroom teacher at Fukaya Municipal Elementary School, and he developed an interest in art. From around the age of seven, he learned drawing and painting at Hanazaki’s painting studio. In his third year at Saitama Prefectural Fukaya Commercial High School, he contracted tuberculosis and spent two years recovering from the illness, during which time he began oil painting and decided to become a painter. In 1964, he enrolled in the Department of Painting at Tama Art University, and from 1966 onward he studied in Saitō Yoshishige’s class. Under Saitō, an extraordinary teacher, he developed flexible ways of thinking through wide-ranging discussions that extended beyond art. After graduating in 1968, he worked at Fujimicho Studio in Naka Ward, Yokohama, and at a workspace in Furocho, both associated with Tama Art University alumni, where he produced work alongside Sekine Nobuo, Suga Kishio, Koshimizu Susumu, and others. During this period, as seen in the work of Takamatsu Jirō, art discourse centered on questioning the act of seeing and the structures that shape visual experience. Immediately after graduating, Yoshida produced three-dimensional works such as “Cut 1” (1968, no longer extant) and “Cut-off” (1968, no longer extant)), in which he sliced open an actual desk and a life-size model of a telephone booth to reveal the unexpected qualities of their cross-sections. These works reflect the widespread focus on discrepancies between vision and cognition at the time. However, his attention to familiar objects and his method of isolating parts of the real world, as suggested by the titles “Cut” and “Cut-off,” remained a defining feature of his subsequent work. In October 1968, when Sekine Nobuo unveiled “Phase–Mother Earth,” a work regarded as epoch-making, at the Contemporary Sculpture Exhibition at Suma Rikyu Park in Kobe, Yoshida assisted in its production together with Koshimizu Susumu and others. “Phase–Mother Earth,” in which the ground was dug into a cylindrical hole and the displaced soil piled into a matching cylinder beside it, led Yoshida to sense possibilities beyond conventional art and prompted him to rethink his own practice. In 1969, he went on to produce a series of works that drew directly on the properties of unaltered objects. These included “Cut-off (Paper Weight)” (April 1969, no longer extant; posthumously refabricated in 2024, The Estate of Katsuro Yoshida [as of 2025]), in which stones were placed on the four corners of a folded and unfolded sheet of paper; “Cut-off” (May 1969, no longer extant; posthumously refabricated in 2007, Blum, Los Angeles [as of 2025]), in which a long iron pipe was stuffed with cotton; “Cut-off (Hang)” (July 1969, no longer extant; refabricated in 1986, Rachofsky Collection, Dallas), in which a thick squared timber was suspended from the ceiling with rope and the rope secured with a heavy stone; “Cut-off No. 2” (August 1969, no longer extant; refabricated in 1990, The National Museum of Art, Osaka), in which four iron plates of different thicknesses were placed on squared timber and allowed to bend under their own weight; and “Cut-off 8” (September 1969, Takamatsu Art Museum, Kagawa), in which an electrical cord was wrapped around squared timber and the bulb at its end lit. These works clearly show features later associated with Mono-ha, such as the pairing of dissimilar materials, the rendering visible of weight and tension, and the presentation of objects in specific states and circumstances. His working notes from this period, densely filled with plans, including for unrealized works, reveal that he was focusing on unremarked things that lay outside human systems of meaning and was exploring how engagement with such things could enable rethinking the relationship between self and world.(Note 1) As an artist who introduced forward-looking methods early in what later came to be known as Mono-ha, Yoshida played a crucial role in the movement. In 1971, he began producing works that incorporated repetitive red brushstrokes. At his solo exhibition in January 1971 at Shirota Gallery in Tokyo, he exhibited “Red, Wire Rope, Wall, etc.,” (no longer extant) in which red brushstrokes were applied to the wall and floor with wire rope stretched in front of them. Later that year, at the 7th Biennale de Paris, he showed “Red, Canvas, Electricity, etc.” (no longer extant; refabricated in 1994, The Estate of Katsuro Yoshida [as of 2025]), in which a horizontal canvas was divided into five areas marked with red brushstrokes, with five bare light bulbs hanging in front of it. From this period, it becomes clear that his focus was gradually shifting away from the Mono-ha approach of presenting objects and toward pictorial elements, which many artists at the time avoided because they were associated with expressiveness. In parallel to his object-based work, Yoshida began producing silkscreen prints in 1969, with landscapes he had photographed himself as subjects. These prints, produced by applying screened layers and slightly offsetting them during printing, reveal his keen attention to the people and objects that populate everyday surroundings. His printmaking soon drew wider acclaim, and in 1970 he received the Dong-A Ilbo Prize (Grand Prize) at the 1st Seoul International Print Biennale. When Yoshida spent about a year in the UK beginning in 1973 on a fellowship from the Japanese Government Overseas Study Program for Artists sponsored by the Agency for Cultural Affairs, he studied printmaking intensively. He worked at the Print Workshop in London, learned photo-etching techniques based on photomechanical processes, and created copperplate prints based on photographs he took on the streets of London. After returning to Japan in 1974, he continued making prints while also working on two-dimensional series. At times he pursued several series at once, and this period of exploring painting while questioning its continuity with his Mono-ha years continued into the early 1980s. In the “Work D” series (1975–1978), for example, he produced works in which motifs from his landscape photographs were rendered in fragmented form using pencil or Conté crayon, as well as works based on a process in which he applied paint to objects and pressed them onto a support to transfer their forms, a method he referred to as “direct capture” or “frottage.” In 1978 and 1979, he began work on the “Work 3” and “Work 4” series. The former was on paper and the latter on canvas, but the underlying method was the same. After applying linear brushstrokes to a wall or pressing paint-coated objects against it, he transferred the resulting marks to the support along with the texture of the wall itself. These were, in effect, paintings formed from the impressions of objects. In large-scale pieces such as “Work 4-44” and “Work 4-45” (both The Estate of Katsuro Yoshida [as of 2025]), shown in a solo exhibition at Tokyo Gallery in 1979, the placement of the linear elements shows his effort to create a pictorial surface across the entire field. He continued using the technique of transferring brushstrokes in the “Work 6” series (1980 to 1986), and he also produced many works in which he brushed chemicals onto the pages of printed matter, transferred those pages to a support, and added collage and related processes. Yoshida’s transfer method is direct, allowing him to keep overt, intentional expressiveness at a distance. Yet once the result takes the form of a two-dimensional work, the physical presence of what has been transferred fades, and a pictorial image inevitably comes to the fore. Yoshida addressed this problem of the image in painting head-on in the “To the Sea” and “Heat Haze” series, which he began in 1982. The fluid and enigmatic forms that characterize these works are not intuitive sketches but compositions created by fragmenting and rendering abstract landscape photographs and similar sources. Although he began with a largely monochromatic palette, he gradually introduced reds and yellows, and also made works in which paint mixed with aluminum powder produced gloss and materiality. In 1986, “Heat Haze” evolved into a series with the subtitle “Sensuality,” featuring enlarged figures taken from magazine photographs. These magnified, isolated parts of the human body register as abstract, yet they produce an effect that taps into the viewer’s physicality at a deep level. The style of “Heat Haze ‘Sensuality’” carried over into the “Touch” series, which he began around 1985–1986. In “Touch,” he laid a primed canvas flat and rubbed powdered graphite onto the surface with his fingers. The physical traces left by his fingertips built up across the canvas, and through variations in density and tone, organic images emerged. These images can appear both vast and minute, bodily yet also reminiscent of landscape or even the cosmos, prompting a wide range of associations. At first, the “Touch” series bore the subtitle “Body,” but as its palette, textures, and forms gradually shifted, the subtitles changed as well, becoming “Bird,” “Bottom of the Lake,” “Mountains,” “Into the Green,” “To Spring,” and others. “Touch” continued for just under fifteen years, nearly half of the artist’s entire career, until shortly before his death from cancer in 1999, and during this period he produced numerous large works more than two meters in size. For Yoshida, “Touch” was the series in which he found the direction he had been seeking in painting since the late 1970s. Having begun his practice in the late 1960s by focusing on the reciprocal relationship between things and the self, he arrived at “Touch,” a body of work made while communing with images and worlds that arose from the immediate sensation of fingertips meeting a surface. It is also notable that the years in which he devoted himself to “Touch” coincided with the period when Mono-ha, the movement he had been involved with at its beginning, was being reassessed internationally. While continuing his own work, Yoshida was also deeply involved in printmaking education from the early 1980s until his final years. At the independent art school Bigakkō, Tokyo School of Arts, Tokyo University of the Arts, Meisei University, and Musashino Art University, he taught copperplate printing, silkscreen, lithography, and other techniques, placing greater weight on the ideas that ground an artist’s practice and on what it means to be an artist than on technique alone.(Note 2) He also played a central role, from the planning stages, in the 1992 establishment of San’nohe Municipal Contemporary Print Institute (now San’nohe Municipal Print Studio) in Aomori Prefecture, working alongside Koida Yasukazu, an architect from the region and a classmate from Tama Art University. The institute, conceived as a place where young artists could undertake residencies and as a way to introduce printmaking to the community, was shaped in part by Yoshida’s experience at the Print Workshop in London, and he made major contributions to its operations as an advisor. Yoshida’s dedication as an educator, shown in his wholehearted guidance of younger artists and his efforts to improve environments for art-making, is still remembered by those who studied with him. (Hirano Itaru / Translated by Christopher Stephens) (Published online: 2026-02-26) Notes 1. Selections from Yoshida Katsurō’s working notes are included in the following publication: Yamamoto Masami, ed., “Yoshida Katsurō: Working Notes 1969–1978” (Suiseisha, 2024). 2. For a detailed discussion of Yoshida Katsurō’s work as an educator, see the following essay: Kikuchi Mao, “Yoshida Katsurō in Educational Settings,” in “Yoshida Katsurō: Touching Things, Landscapes, and the World,” exh. cat. (The Museum of Modern Art, Kamakura & Hayama / The Museum of Modern Art, Saitama, 2024), pp. 196–199.