Saru Gallery
       Japanese Prints & Japanese Paintings

Biography Hamada, Chimei (1917 - )

Hamada Chimei was born in Kumamoto Prefecture on December 23, 1917. From 1934 to 1939 he studied at the Tokyo School of Fine Arts, graduating in 1939.
In that year he was conscripted into the army, and in 1940 he was dispatched to China. After a short military discharge, he was reconscripted but was sent home in 1945 because of his injuries. In 1949 he became a member of the Jiyu Bijutsuka Kyokai (Independent Artists' Association). He was invited to exhibit at the Second Contemporary Art Exhibition in 1956, and in the same year he exhibited at the Mostra Internazionale di Bianco e Nero in Lugano. In this period he gained recognition for his series Elegy of the New Recruits, which he had worked on from 1950. The series was based on the experiences that occurred to one soldier during his military service. Unable to erase the experiences both of military service that parallelled his own suffering and of the absolute obedience and absurdity of the miserable conditions that characterized the war, he expressed these sentiments in his work in monochromatic etchings.
After this series his work remained characterized by the same humanistic strain. His works have a sarcastic and critical undertone, sometimes sardonic, but also scathing in their comments on society.
From his first success as an artist in 1956 he has remained active for more than fifty years, adding sculptures to his oeuvre. He has exhibited all over the world. Outside Japan his work was shown (a.o.) in Paris, at the British Museum, and at the Uffizi Gallery in Florence in 2008, where he was the first Japanese artist ever shown there.