Reaching for the Invisible: Two Artists Explore the Boundaries of Japanese Printmaking

Two ways to make the invisible visible

A camera can capture a moment in a fraction of a second. A woodblock print can take weeks to interpret that moment anew. A drawing can be built from innumerable pencil strokes that leave no single decisive image to identify. These different ideas of time and seeing meet in a small exhibition in Tokyo, where Japanese woodcut artist Katsutoshi Yuasa and German painter-draughtswoman Regina Sell investigate what an image can reveal beyond its immediately recognizable subject.

“Reaching for the invisible,” presented by the OAG at its German Cultural Centre in Akasaka from November 9 to 15, 2026, also carries a more provocative Japanese title: “空を掴む” (Kū o tsukamu), the effort to grasp something intangible, even an apparently impossible undertaking. The organizer identifies repetition—carving line after line, drawing stroke after stroke—as the link between two otherwise very different artistic practices.

An exhibition built around an impossible task

The exhibition text deliberately avoids promising a revelation with a neat label. To grasp what cannot be grasped is an impossible instruction, yet artists repeatedly return to the attempt. Their actions may look redundant from outside: why carve a photograph by hand when it can be printed instantly, or cover a prepared canvas with graphite marks when a machine can make uniform lines?

The answer offered by the works is not simply that handwork is superior to technology. Deliberate, physical repetition changes the information being conveyed. The exhibition places Yuasa’s meticulously incised surfaces beside Sell’s accumulated graphite fields; they approach perception from radically different materials. It is important not to turn this into a vague story about two Japanese woodblock artists. Only one is a woodcut printmaker.

Katsutoshi Yuasa: taking a photograph apart

Born in Tokyo in 1978, Katsutoshi Yuasa studied printmaking at Musashino Art University and completed a master’s degree at London’s Royal College of Art in 2005. His work often begins with photographs he takes himself. He reinterprets their light and shadow as a carved wooden matrix, cutting the image by hand and printing it with a baren, the traditional Japanese hand-rubbing tool.

A photographed instant becomes a sustained encounter. The artist must decide which lines to preserve as raised surfaces, which to remove, how light should dissolve, and what a paper impression can convey that the original pixels could not. A 2009 exhibition at the Daiwa Anglo-Japanese Foundation in London described his scenes of plants, urban life and domestic subjects as hovering between recognition and abstraction. The image acquires atmosphere through the time spent remaking it.

The materials change the message

Woodblock printing is a mechanical process, but it is not immaterial reproduction. Knife marks shape the block. Ink or pigment interacts with paper. Humidity, pressure, and the texture of fibers influence the impression. The baren transfers an image through the artist’s hands. A photograph may be digitally processed before cutting, yet the resulting print is a physical object with an independent surface and history.

The OAG identifies Yuasa’s 2026 work “Vulgar attacks” as a water-based woodblock print using handmade Japanese paper, including Oguni washi and snow-bleached kōzo paper. Another work, “Pi dreams” (“円周率は夢をみる”), is listed as an oil-based woodcut. Those distinctions matter: not every Japanese woodblock print uses precisely the same pigments, supports or technique. The exhibition’s documented examples invite close attention to how materials shape expression.

Regina Sell: the motion inside a pencil line

Regina Sell was born in Mülheim an der Ruhr, Germany. She studied graphic design in Krefeld and fine painting and graphics at the State Academy of Fine Arts in Stuttgart. Early experiments combined egg tempera, oils and different pigments; her mature practice has increasingly concentrated on graphite drawings on white-primed canvas. She is based in Berlin.

Her marks overlap in dense and sometimes seemingly shifting fields. The OAG says prolonged looking can make those areas appear to move, though there is no claim of actual kinetic machinery. What matters is the way perception changes across distance, duration and attention. In this exhibition, Sell is neither a supporting illustrator of Yuasa’s photographs nor another woodblock printer. Her sustained drawing practice is a distinct argument about what lines can do.

From Edo printing houses to the solitary maker

Woodblock printing has a long Japanese history, but its celebrated Edo-period flourishing grew around an intricate division of labor. An artist supplied a design; specialist carvers prepared blocks; printers registered successive colors on handmade paper; a publisher organized production and sale. Edo moku-hanga became a vehicle for relatively affordable popular images, including actors, landscapes and the everyday attractions of urban life. Tokyo’s traditional-crafts authority describes the continuing importance of the carver, printer, washi and baren.

Yuasa follows this history while changing its production logic. Instead of a publisher-directed team, he controls his photographs, carving and printing himself. This is not proof that collaborative Edo crafts were less expressive. Rather, it moves the decisions between camera, carved matrix and impression into one person’s working process. Tradition survives not as a frozen set of jobs but as a repertoire of techniques capable of new questions.

Why the nineteenth century still matters

Japanese prints transformed Western ideas of composition, cropping and everyday subject matter in the nineteenth century, while later photographers and painters in Japan engaged with the technologies and styles that arrived from abroad. The exchange was never only one-way. It is tempting to describe a contemporary Japanese–German show as a simple blending of East and West, but the artists’ biographies resist such shorthand.

Yuasa’s training extended from Tokyo to London; Sell’s studies and professional life are rooted in Germany, with exhibitions in Tokyo including a 2025 solo show. The current two-person presentation does not document a jointly produced body of work. Instead it puts separate practices into dialogue across different materials and visual traditions—a more precise, and more revealing, account of cultural exchange.

A German institution with 153 years of Tokyo history

The venue itself belongs to a longer history. Founded in Tokyo in 1873 by German merchants, scholars and diplomats, the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Natur- und Völkerkunde Ostasiens (OAG) set out to collect and circulate knowledge about Japan and East Asia. It has continued with publications, lectures and cultural events. An exhibition in its Akasaka building therefore occupies more than a neutral room: it extends a history of learning across languages and borders.

The exhibition is curated by Yuki Terashima of YUKI-SIS and Stefan Speidel of the OAG. The organizer credits Dr. Rania Sid Otmane as Regina Sell’s curator and acknowledges Hiromichi Murauchi. These roles are taken from the official program. Without interviews, they do not establish how the two artists first met, who suggested the pairing or whether a collaboration will continue beyond this show.

How to look at work that resists explanation

Yuasa’s prints reward two viewing distances. From afar a photographic scene may emerge; close up the incisions, density, registration and paper surface become evident. With Sell’s graphite pictures, a distant tonal field may resolve into strokes upon strokes. A viewer can alternate between the whole and the mark, noticing how the apparent image is assembled and how the labor remains partly invisible in the finished work.

This is a suggested method of looking, not an eyewitness review. The official announcement names certain works and their materials, but it does not supply a complete independently verified catalogue of everything on display. Nor should the accompanying AI-generated editorial illustration be mistaken for a Yuasa or Sell artwork; it is an interpretation inspired by the public-domain Rinpa visual vocabulary of Ogata Kōrin.

A week in Akasaka, and a question that stays open

The exhibition runs November 9–15, 2026, in the first-floor lobby of OAG-Haus, 7-5-56 Akasaka, Minato-ku, Tokyo. Opening hours are 10 a.m. to 8 p.m. on weekdays and 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. on weekends, with free admission. The organizer lists an opening reception for Wednesday, November 11, at 8 p.m. Visitors should check its official event page before travelling.

The program also offers Yuasa’s 2025 art book “IMAGEMAKER,” published by Suiseisha, for ¥5,500. What visitors take home need not be a simple answer about the invisible. In two incompatible but complementary ways, Yuasa and Sell insist that an image is also an accumulation of decisions. A camera’s instant and a pencil’s repeated stroke may both hold more time than the eye first detects.