What actually is Mokuhanga? Good question. Let’s look at the Japanese word first - it’s made of two words, ‘moku’ (木) meaning wood or tree and ‘hanga’ (版画) meaning prints. So, the literal meaning is ‘wood print’. Mokuhanga is a form of relief printmaking. In English we use some different terms for similar, but different forms of printmaking using wood, which can get a little confusing (for me at least): woodcut, woodblock and wood engraving.
Let’s start with wood engraving - wood engraving uses the end grain of a block of wood, meaning it becomes incredibly difficult to carve. End grain is the grain of wood seen when it is cut across the growth rings. Rather than cutting a plank of wood the length of the trunk, end grain wood is actually cut at a 90-degree angle to the grain.
Because of the strength of the end grain, it means that carving very fine lines into the wood are possible. Additionally, it makes it possible to produce very large print runs without the quality of the wood degrading. The advantage of wood engravings is its ability to reproduce realistic drawings and capture subtle gradations required in printing intricate illustrations.
Woodcuts (and woodblock) do not use end grain, instead using the long grain of the wood. The biggest difference is that it uses oil based inks, which are applied with a brayer or roller and can be printed in a printing press or by hand. As the inks are oil based, they are generally opaque when printed and sit slightly on the surface of the paper leaving a textured surface.
Woodblock printing refers to the type of printing that the Japanese and Chinese practice using water based inks. It’s quite similar to woodcut printmaking, but differs by using water based pigments (water colour, gouache), which can be translucent, allowing for multiple layers being printed and enhancing the complexity of the colours being built up. Instead of a brayer or roller being used to apply the pigment, brushes are used to spread a thin layer of pigment directly on the wood block, allowing more flexibility in how the pigments are applied to the block. Instead of being printed through a press, woodblock prints are printed by hand using a baren.
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For this article I’ll be talking specifically about Japanese woodblocks and I’ll be referring to them as mokuhanga or woodblock.
Woodblock printing originated in China and was thought to have come to Japan in the late 8th century. It was originally used to reproduce simple black and white texts, such as Buddhist sutras and mantras.
The first known example of woodblock printing from Japan was commissioned by Empress Kōken in 764. She commissioned one million small wooden pagodas, each containing a small woodblock scroll printed with a Buddhist text called hyakumanto Darani. These were distributed to temples around Japan as gratitude for the suppression of the Emi Rebellion in 764.
By the eleventh century, Buddhist temples in Japan produced printed books of sutras, mantras, and other Buddhist texts and images. For centuries, printing was mainly restricted to the Buddhist sphere, as it was too expensive for mass production, and did not have a receptive, literate public as a market. At this point in time, the registration system, called kento, hadn’t been invented yet either. The kento allows multiple blocks to be printed and helps align each individual woodblock during the printing process. Printing was restricted to black texts and black outlines of images, which would later be hand coloured, taking up precious time and therefore would hinder the mass production aspect of printing.
By the start of the Edo Period (1603-1868), woodblock printing started to gain acceptance by the general public.
At around the same time, the production method of making mokuhanga started to diversify (in Japanese called hanmoto) - instead of one person creating, carving and printing a whole series of prints; the workload was split between three people - an artist who produces the images, a carver and a printer. They would be employed by a publisher, who would finance the print run. Splitting up the different stages of woodblock production allowed for efficient mass production and the ability to sell high quantity and high quality images to the general public at affordable prices.
In the early days, only simple images were produced - only printing from a single block of wood and using only black for the outlines. Over time, a method called tan-e was developed in which vermillion was added by hand after printing.
From around the Tempo Era (1716-1735), the use of more complex colours became common. Methods such as urushi-e and beni-e became popular. In Japanese woodblock printing, urushi-e generally refers to a hand-painted technique. Instead of printing with urushi (natural lacquer) it was painted on by hand. This meant that urushi-e pictures could be more colourful than most block prints of the time. Five colours were available when the technique was first developed; brown, yellow, green, red, and black. Urushi-e was sometimes used as a term to describe all hand-painted woodblock prints in Japan. Beni-e is quite a similar method of printing and hand-colouring, but used a pinkish red instead.
Around the end of the Kanpo Era (1741-1743), a method of printing two-colour pictures was developed, called benizuri-e, typically printed in pink and green and other colours added by hand. This was considered the “primitive” ukiyo-e style.
Skip forward to the 19th century, and Japanese woodblock, arguably, reached its peak. Carving and printing have become far more intricate and sophisticated; the most well known artists from this time, such as Katsushika Hokusai (1760-1849), Utagawa Hiroshige (1797-1858) among others, are alive and producing their most popular and well known mokuhanga prints during this period. The hanmoto system of production is now very well developed and mass production of woodblock prints is underway and massively popular with the general public (of Japan in the 19th century).
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In Japan, especially before 1853 when Japan closed itself off from the outside world, it’s important to note that the Japanese people didn’t consider mokuhanga as art, and additionally there was no concept of editioning or even copyright. It was common for a publishing company to print anywhere from 500 to 1000 prints per block, but could be more depending on the quality of the carved wooden blocks and how popular the image was. No concept of copyright meant that it was perfectly acceptable, and normal, to copy popular prints. For example, there could be (and were) multiple versions of The Great Wave by Hokusai.
Ukiyo-e, in English means pictures of the floating world; despite being in English, wtf does that actually mean? To me, ukiyo-e means images depicting subjects from everyday life, similar to pop art, in that it references imagery from popular and mass culture. I like to think of the imagery produced in this time as pop culture (of the 19th century). There were travel postcards, posters, magazines, books and even the beginnings of manga. Beautiful landscapes (e.g. Hokusai's 36 Views of Mt. Fuji 1830-1832), posters of models, actors (kabuki theatre), sumo wrestlers, samurai warriors, fairy tales, scenes from history, flora and fauna, pornography and probably more were some of the examples of subject matter. They were not considered precious or expensive, but rather were inexpensive posters, postcards or books that could be pasted up on their wall or placed in the drawer and then thrown out when they saw something more interesting. Ukiyo-e was a movement within the larger umbrella of Japanese mokuhanga.
Following the opening of Japan to the rest of the world in 1853, mokuhanga’s popularity slowly started to decline due to the introduction of black and white photography and modern printing processes that were faster and cheaper to produce than mokuhanga. Utagawa Kuniyoshi (1798-1861) was considered to be one of the last masters of the ukiyo-e style.
Following the decline of ukiyo-e, the term shin hanga (meaning new print 新版画) was coined in 1915 by Shozaburo Watanabe (1885-1962) who was a woodblock print publisher. Shin hanga was another movement within mokuhanga which flourished from around 1915-1942, and a little bit post war. It was seen as a revival of the earlier ukiyo-e movement and kept alive the collaborative hanmoto system where the artist, carver, printer and publisher worked together, while also being inspired by European Impressionism (which interestingly were also inspired by ukiyo-e prints) and western perspective such as light and mood. The themes however, remained strictly traditional; landscapes, famous places, beautiful women, kabuki actors and birds and flowers. It was a fusion of Western art and Japanese values, including the traditional method of woodblock printing.
Sosaku Hanga (creative print 創作版画), a movement happening parallel to shin hanga, stressed the artist as the sole creator motivated by a desire for self-expression. The artist was responsible for everything - creating the image, carving, printing and marketing their own artworks.
Contemporary mokuhanga is difficult to define because, in my opinion, it has become more than just these movements I mentioned above but a combination of some or all of these different qualities, values and aesthetics. These days, mokuhanga isn’t just made in Japan, by Japanese people or made only by men; there are men and women woodblock artists all over the world now, and I think that demonstrates how accessible and adaptable mokuhanga can be.
There are actually some existing hanmoto-style businesses still around today where carvers and printers are hired to produce reproductions of popular ukiyo-e or shin hanga prints, such as, David Bull at Mokuhankan, Adachi Institute, Yoshida Family and a few others who are keeping the old traditions alive.
TLDR: Mokuhanga is a form of relief printmaking, originating from Japan using water-based pigments, which are applied to the surface of wood blocks and printed by hand with a barren.
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