Serizawa, Keisuke
Serizawa Keisuke came from a family of cloth merchants in the city of Shizuoka (on the island of Honshū). While dreaming of becoming an artist, Serizawa undertook a more practical education because of his family’s declining fortunes. He studied print design at the Tokyo Higher Industrial School (later Tokyo Industrial University).
Inspired by the philosophy of Yanagi Muneyoshi (1889-1961), the founder of the Japanese Mingei (Folk Art) Movement, and after seeing an exhibit of stencil-dyed textiles from Okinawa (bingata) at the Exposition for the Promotion of National Products in 1928, Serizawa began studying and working with traditional Japanese and Okinawan stencil-dyeing (bingata) techniques. Serizawa exhibited his first major stencil-dyed work in 1929 and soon became a leading figure in Mingei Movement, gaining many students.
Unlike the division of labor usual in earlier stencil-dyed cloth production, Serizawa at first often undertook all aspects of stencil-dyeing (katazome) himself, such as creating the design, cutting the stencils, laying the resist paste and applying dies. Later in life he often concentrated on just the design and on cutting the stencils.
During his long career, Serizawa produced original dyed artworks on both cloth and paper. In keeping with the Folk Art philosophy most of his works are utilitarian objects, such as kimono, kimono sashes, folding screens, wall hangings, fans, calendars, book-illustrations and postcards. As is evident from the entrance curtain and calendar pictures exhibited here, Serizawa’s style was influenced by bingata in its reliance on bright colors, naturalistic subjects rendered in un-correlated relationships of scale as well as color gradations and mixtures (kumadori).
In 1956, Serizawa was awarded the title Living National Treasure by the Japanese government. To recognize and specify his original achievements, Japan’s Commission for the Protection of Cultural Properties created the term kataezome, meaning original artworks made using the traditional techniques of stencil-dyeing called katazome.
