Sugiura Hisui and Hisui Hyakkafu

The Kawagoe City Art Museum marks 150 years since the birth of Sugiura Hisui (1876-1965), a designer who helped lay the foundations of graphic design in Japan, with a special exhibition on his best-known work, Hisui Hyakkafu, a book of woodblock prints of plants.

Sugiura Hisui

Hisui was born in Matsuyama, Ehime Prefecture, and graduated in 1901 from the school that is now Tokyo University of the Arts. In 1904 he married Iwasaki Suiko, who came from Kawagoe. From 1908 to 1933 he worked for the Mitsukoshi department store, designing its posters and booklets, and in 1935 he became head of the school that is now Tama Art University. He received the Imperial Prize of the Japan Art Academy in 1955 and died in 1965, aged 89.

In 1944, during the war, he moved to Karuizawa and left his work in the care of the Iwasaki family in Kawagoe. These papers, kept in the town ever since, are known as the Hisui evacuation materials.

Hisui Hyakkafu

Hisui Hyakkafu, meaning a hundred flowers by Hisui, was published by Shunyodo between 1920 and 1922 in an edition of 600. It is a set of 100 woodblock prints made from Hisui's drawings of plants from life, each with a commentary and a silhouette drawing of the plant. Unlike his earlier books of designs, it collects the drawings he made before they became designs.

In 2023 the museum showed for the first time 71 original drawings for the book, found among the evacuation materials. Research since then has identified 112 original drawings connected with it, some of them held by other institutions, and this exhibition brings together as many of them as it can.

The exhibition

Original drawings hang beside the finished prints, showing how Hisui's drawing was turned into woodblock prints by the craftsmen who cut and printed them. Drawings that were never cut into blocks for the book, and material found in the latest research, show how he planned it.

One section looks at the silhouette drawings and the part silhouettes played in his designs, both as decoration and as symbols. A selection from the evacuation materials gives a short survey of his career as a graphic designer and as an artist.

Talks and workshops

A lecture on Hisui's design, short talks by the curators on the original drawings and the silhouettes, and gallery tours by the curators, one of them with sign language interpretation, are held during the exhibition. There are also workshops for making badges with Hisui's designs and for turning visitors' own drawings into chiyogami, patterned paper.