Shoichi Hasegawa

(Japanese, born 1929)

Shoichi Hasegawa is a contemporary Japanese abstract painter and printmaker. His watercolors, transparent yet dense and symbolically coded, are influenced by Lyrical Abstraction and artists like Mark Rothko and Paul Klee. He employs soft, pastel palettes and layered textures to create works that reflect the laborious process that goes into their making. Born in Yazu, Japan in 1929, Hasegawa studied drawing and painting at the Kokuga Institute in Kyoto, Japan. In 1961, he moved to Paris to work with the British artist Stanley William Hayter at Atelier 17, and began showing work internationally at that time. Today, Hasegawa’s paintings and delicate prints are in the collections of the Bibliothèque nationale in Paris, The Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, the Norrköpings Museum of Art, and the Museum Fuji in Tokyo. Hasegawa lives and works in Val-d'Oise, France—notably, the same place where the celebrated Impressionist master Claude Monet once lived.