White Lotus show features recent intaglio prints by Oregon artist Yuji Hiratsuka

(Above: Retro Mode Dancing with Crane is part of a show called Contemporary Narratives: Intaglio Prints by Yuji Hiratsuka. The artist is known for melding age-old Japanese artistic style with modern cultural subjects.)

By Randi Bjornstad

Yes, Yuji Hiratsuka’s work has a heavily Asian influence — the artist, after all, was born and raised in Osaka, Japan, before graduating in art education from Tokyo Gakugei University and then returning to Osaka to teach art at the middle and high school levels.

Artist Yuji Hiratsuka displays his playful interconnection between traditional Japanese art and modern Western cultural fads in prints such as this recent creation, Koban Angel.

But he also was an artist, and he came to the United States in 1985 to take a position as graduate assistant at New Mexico State University in Las Cruces.  Seven years later, he relocated to Corvallis, where he joined the printmaking faculty at Oregon State University, and where he remains.

Notably, however, the introduction of his latest show of recent work at the White Lotus Gallery in downtown Eugene — where he is a represented artist — points out that he was raised “among a mixture of Eastern and Western influences” that has influenced his work throughout his career.

His blended cultural experience allows him to introduce whimsy and color to his creations as he mingles traditional Japanese artistic style with thoroughly modern — and often distinctly Western — subjects. He explores fashion in the form of dresses, shoes, hair styles, facial expressions, and relationships (even in one case portraying a teakettle pouring water into a woman’s styrofoam Cup Noodle container).

But Hiratsuka generally does not give his subjects eyes — even sometimes no noses — giving as a reason in one of his artist statements, “The human face is always changing; the face at work is different from the face that enjoys the love. Aging changes the faces also. I want my prints to express this change.” The ambiguity allows viewers not to dwell on interpreting the artist’s intent but to add their own interpretation of the meaning, offering “the aspect of suggestion rather than expression.”

His handling of the medium of intaglio printing also distinguishes Hiratsuka’s art. The definition of intaglio is “​an engraved or incised figure in stone or other hard material cut down below the surface so that an impression from the design yields an image in relief.” In order to make multi-colored prints, therefore, separate plates must be created for each color, which Hiratsuka does by printing one color at a time but using the same copper plate with new etching added for each color.

Another recent Hiratsuka intaglio print, Quick Bites, Snacks, and Hot Drink