Blossoming (XIX), 1993
91.2 x 61.3 cm

Kawachi is a brave, modern artist who boldly renders his personal dreams and fantasies into visual form be means of his own uniquely structured style of woodblock print art. His works are modern, yet what is captured in his personal world ring with the melodies of a pure and free soul celebrating life. His approach to woodblock print art is totally original, and constitutes a revitalization of this traditional Japanese art form, capturing the feelings and emotions and sensuality of modern man by means of the woodblock medium.

Mamoru Yonekura
Art Critic

 


 

Fly! Over Hokusai (IV), 1995
99.5 x 68.5 cm 

The emergence of a major artist is naturally ann occasion for congratulation at any time, but there are special reasons why Kawachi is so significant. For he has not only revived the artistic and technical possibilities of the craft of woodblock printing in a thoroughly contemporary way, but has also done it in a style which derives fully from the urban world of modern Japan without losing that inner sensitivity to design and texture which has always beed such a marked feature of Japanese material culture. In this sense I believe that future art historians will assess his as a man in the specifically Japanese graphic tradition, even more than as the international artist he quite clearly is.
The basis of Kawachi's importance in Japanese art history (in contrast to his significance in the international art-scene) is his creative skill with the woodblock medium. for that is the technique in which Japan's graphic art has flourished since its great expansion in the 17th century. Indeed, until the Meiji period almost no other technique was used, with the exception of some minority Edo period experiments in copper engraving and etching which produced no work of outstanding merit. Woodblock, therefor, is the natural and traditional medium for Japanese graphics, and to lose touch with it would be to cut off its major source of life.

Since around 1979 images, in which the timber was crossed in a T-shape, part of which was cleft, bundled or broken and cracked, were beginning to appear as seen in series "Katsura" ("I named this work KATSURA after Katsura Imperial Villa in Kyoto - one of the most distinguished styles of Japanese architecture, which is famous for its beautiful and strong pillars"SK), "Integration" or "Crack". It did not only mean the change of a pattern, but it meant that Kawachi has contrived to express the movement more naturally by free combination of wood, drawing the boxes casting off at a distance. One can see the motion of energy created by the force added to the image so that the wood cracks, breaks or is crushed after being pulled or bundled by the ropes.

Seiko Kawachi makes use of strokes and lines to fill the painting's dark values with richness in atmosphere, and sent a gloss on the light parts of objects. He adopts vermilion of reflect black, putting life into works, undertaking links, and adds vitality to the somber and obscure world. It seems that the red color originates from remote and ancient ceremony. That presentation of surrealism establishes a new king of realism.