Saru Gallery
       Japanese Prints & Japanese Paintings

Biography Kôsaka, Gajin (1877 - 1953)

Born in Kyoto as Masanosuke Kôsaka in 1877, he became an elementary school teacher in 1901. In the early years of the 20th century he studied Japanese-style painting with Konô Bairei and Yamamoto Shunkyo, and in 1907 he moved to Tokyo, where he continued studying painting. From 1922 he exhibited with the Nihon Sôsaku-Hanga Kyôkai, and with other hanga groups. After the war he changed his name to Gajin. More important was the destruction of his Tokyo home in an air raid in 1945. All his prints were destroyed, and from that moment he changed his style from traditional Sôsaku Hanga to a very personal style, printing on unsized paper in a monochrome wet ink technique. He had one-man exhibitions in Los Angeles in 1950 and in Paris in 1952, and thus soon won international acclaim. In the 1960 Chicago Exhibition one of his prints figured on the flyleaf of the catalogue His work is very rare.