This March, step into a world where nature-themed prints meet Portland Japanese Garden’s springtime vibrance in Enduring Impressions: Contemporary Woodblock Prints. Featuring the art of mokuhanga (木版画), Japanese-style woodblock printmaking, this exhibition reveals how a centuries-old tradition is experiencing a contemporary revival as artists around the world use the quiet power and unique characteristics of woodblock printmaking to create captivating works of art.
Mokuhanga has been embraced as an environmentally friendly art form that uses wood, water-based pigments, and paper made from plant fibers. The exhibition’s featured artists are among the growing international movement where meticulously crafted art prints incorporating these traditional tools and techniques are complemented by alternative printmaking technologies and strategies for contemporary expression. This exhibition marks the Garden’s first collaboration with the Honolulu Museum of Art and is co-curated by Stephen Salel, the Museum’s Curator of Japanese Art. Across the galleries at Portland Japanese Garden, Enduring Impressions presents an eclectic range of contemporary prints, alongside a behind-the-scenes look at the process, history and future of this iconic art form.
Photos documenting the mokuhanga process courtesy of Takezasadō Co, LTD
Photos documenting the mokuhanga process courtesy of Takezasadō Co, LTD
Photos documenting the mokuhanga process courtesy of Takezasadō Co, LTD
Photos documenting the mokuhanga process courtesy of Takezasadō Co, LTD
Photos documenting the mokuhanga process courtesy of Takezasadō Co, LTD
The Pavilion Gallery
The Pavilion Gallery features the original six artists who participated in the Honolulu Museum of Art’s iteration of the exhibition in fall of 2025:
- Yoonmi Nam, Korean artist and professor of printmaking at the University of Kansas
- April Vollmer, New York-based printmaker and author of Japanese Woodblock Print Workshop: A Modern Guide to the Ancient Art of Mokuhanga (2015)
- Kenji Takenaka, Kyoto-based printmaker and leader of the Takezasadō Printmaking Workshop
- Hiroki, Setsuko, and Miho Morinoue, Hawai’i-based family of artists, running the community-focused Donkey Mill Art Center in Hōlualoa, Hawai‘i
Accompanying the original six artists is work by Portland-based illustrator and printmaker, Aya Morton, whose mokuhanga-inspired prints merge silkscreen with relief printing processes to produce beautifully rendered scenes of the Pacific Northwest.
The Calvin and Mayho Tanabe Gallery
Throughout history, the process behind the art of mokuhanga has inspired artists across cultures and eras. Complementing the contemporary woodblock prints highlighted in the Pavilion Gallery, take a glimpse at the diverse accomplishments of this printmaking tradition through the remarkable work of two pivotal artists: Kawase Hasui (1883-1957), one of Japan’s most iconic artists of the 20th century, and Portland-born Richard Diebenkorn (1922–1993), a prominent American Abstract Expressionist. Though visually distinct, their prints are nonetheless linked across time and space by the meticulous craftsmanship and expert-driven processes at the heart of traditional mokuhanga.
The Tanabe Gallery exhibition was made possible through support from:
The Lavenberg Collection of Japanese Prints
The Collections of Jordan D. Schnitzer and His Family Foundation
Major support provided by:
