Beyond Japan Transcript
Series 2, Episode 23: Global Crafts: Woodblock Prints with Wuon-Gean Ho
Edited by Oliver Moxham, Host and Producer

OM: Oliver Moxham
WGH: Wuon-Gean Ho

Copyright © 2022 Oliver Moxham, ℗ 2022 Oliver Moxham. May be freely distributed for education
purposes.
1

OM: Hello and welcome to Beyond Japan, an interdisciplinary podcast that looks at thebroad reach of Japanese Studies from within and beyond Japan. This podcast isbrought to you by the Centre for Japanese Studies at the Sainsbury Institute for the
Study of Japanese Arts and Cultures in collaboration with the University of East Anglia.
I’m your host, Oliver Moxham, Research Project Coordinator at the Sainsbury Instituteand researcher of language and Japanese war heritage.
This week we are joined by Wuon-Gean Ho, printmaker and research associate at the
University of West England’s Centre for Print Research, to discuss the place of
mokuhanga, or woodblock printmaking, in the global spread of traditional crafts. WuonGean Ho walks us through her path to mokuhanga, her experience learning from amaster printmaker in Japan and how learning these traditional methods have shaped
her growth as an artist.
We hope you enjoy the show.

OM: Okay, good morning Wuon-Gean, thank you for joining me on the podcast today.
WGH: Nice to meet you, Oliver. It's fantastic to be here.
OM: So, first off, we'd like to know a bit more about you. Can you tell us about your areaof expertise and how your interests brought you there?

Copyright © 2022 Oliver Moxham, ℗ 2022 Oliver Moxham. May be freely distributed for education
purposes.
2

WGH: Okay. My name is Wuon-Gean and I'm a printmaker, and that means I'm an artist
that uses print in my artistic output. But I'm alSo, a research associate at the Centre forFine Print Research in the University of West of England in Bristol. So, I edit anacademic journal and I'm doing a PhD on printmaking and the mechanisms of touch
when you make prints. So, a three-pronged print related lifestyle, as it were, work style.
OM: So, on your website, you have a blog entitled 'Diary of a Printmaker', with animpressive array of your linocut works. However, you present yourself as a multimedia
artist who has worked with animation, drawing and photography. How did you become aprint maker rather than an animator or photographer? Was that something apparent
from the beginning of your artistic career?
WGH: Okay, I actually probably did come to art through print because I grew up in
Oxford, which is quite close to an art fair called 'Art in Action'. And it was a four-day
event in tents in a field, and you could learn artistic techniques in really short bite size
lessons for children. And I think I was about eleven when I did a linocut class. My very
first print was a picture of a cat on a roof. And I remember being really thrilled that when
I pulled the paper back, I could see this image that I could make more of. So,
printmaking for me became a real passion and something I would do on my spare time.
And for me, it's a way of making an image which asks the question, “what happens
next?” Do you make a print and then you can easily modify the matrix and makeanother print that's slightly different? Or you can make a print and then you can think toyourself, well, what happens around the corner? What's on the other side of this image?
Copyright © 2022 Oliver Moxham, ℗ 2022 Oliver Moxham. May be freely distributed for education
purposes.
3

And when you work in series like that, it naturally falls into book, arts and animation and,by extension, into film. So, at heart I’m a storyteller. And I really love narrative, and I
think printmaking sort of does that naturally.
OM: So, your printing style is derived from mokuhanga, Japanese water-based
woodblock printing. Could you explain for our listeners how this is distinct from otherwoodblock printing techniques and how you came to adopt this style?
WGH: Okay. I have to give you a bit of life history here because I grew up in a family
where my dad was a vet and my mum was a nurse and I'm the oldest daughter. So,
they were very keen for me to take over the family business. I mentioned to you I love
print when I was a child, but they were keen for me to at least study something that hada kind of profession at university. So, I went to university and trained as a vet and madeprints in my spare time. And halfway through the course, I thought, "I can't do thisprofession. It's too difficult. It's too different from my natural passion." And So, I took ayear out, and I ended up in Japan teaching English on the JET [Japan Exchange &Teaching] program. And this was my first introduction to living in Japan and the tools
and materials that they had in the stationery shop that you could use to make nengajo,
or New Year cards. So, I remember taking home some pieces of Japanese vinyl andlittle blocks of wood and buying a little set of carving tools and making prints in my livingroom in the house where I was staying in Kagoshima. So, this was my first introduction
to printmaking from a Japanese perspective. In my final year of college and vet school, I
thought, well, there is this incredible opportunity to apply for a Japanese government
Copyright © 2022 Oliver Moxham, ℗ 2022 Oliver Moxham. May be freely distributed for education
purposes.
4

scholarship, the 'Monbu Kagakusho' [MEXT] Scholarship. So, I applied with myportfolio, and I was incredibly lucky to be awarded this scholarship to go and study in auniversity in Japan and to study mokuhanga, which is Japanese woodblock printmaking
over there. So, it's a bit of a funny story because it's not really very straightforward.
So, I ended up going to Osaka Kyoikudaigaku, which is Osaka Educational University.
And it wasn't my first choice University, but due to the kind of sudden economic
recession, I ended up there. And actually nobody really knew how to do mokuhanga
Japanese woodblock printmaking in the college where I was. So, I ended up joining theswim team and taking photos and making rings. And I tell you about the swim teambecause I think that taught me more potentially about how to make than any otherexperience that has happened in my life. So, basically, I'm not brilliant swimmer, but I
love swimming. And the only way to swim in the University pool was to join the team,and I found myself in a group of very talented young people who were, at the time, thebest team in the University Championships. And we were trained 2 hours a day, and in
the summer, we had camps. We trained for 4 hours a day, like 2 hours in the morningand 2 hours at night. And I realized that I was never going to be very good. I was always
the slowest get to the end of the lane, and everybody would go "hai!", and then we'd go
off and swim again, and they would finish their drills, and then they'd wait for me tocatch up. And the minute I got to the end, they'd set off again. So, I was permanently
the worst person, which was really embarrassing situation, but made me think, why do
we do anything in life at all? I mean, do we do things because we're brilliant at them, or
do we do them because they are an interesting thing to do? Or do we think that even if
Copyright © 2022 Oliver Moxham, ℗ 2022 Oliver Moxham. May be freely distributed for education
purposes.
5

you have no positive feedback, just the act of doing something is enough in and of
itself? I think that's a kind of contrast between being goal-oriented and being practicebased, somebody who's quite interested in doing something for its own sake. And I
learned that I was never going to be the best, but that it was enough for me to be on thejourney. So, that's what happened. I was part of the swim team. I told them I wouldn't
compete because I would bring their scores down. But they did win the all Japan
contest that year, and I think I put my ego to one side, and I experienced (I think it's
probably) a very Japanese sense of encouraging each other, no matter how good you
are in the group that I learned and just the sheer physical pleasure of being in the water
had to be enough. Being the best was not really the aim of the practice. And I kind ofdive into art in a similar way. I kind of think, okay, I'm going on a journey. I'm going toenjoy this journey. I'm not sure where the goal is, and I think turning up and having a go
is as valid as turning up and being brilliant. Maybe it's never going to be within grasp to
try and be brilliant immediately, but to turn up is a very valid thing to do.
OM: I think it sounds surprisingly similar to academia. I think that many academics
suffer from imposter syndrome and there’s this pressure to be the most prolific writer ofarticles or be at the cutting edge of research. But you have to check yourself and saythat "I'm contributing. I'm doing something I love, and that's needs to be enough", youknow?
WGH: Then you become more authentic because in a way, if you're always trying tofocus on the end result, it can hamper your freedom in the moment for something to
Copyright © 2022 Oliver Moxham, ℗ 2022 Oliver Moxham. May be freely distributed for education
purposes.
6

change. So, I normally try not to promise anything. When I make something, I don't tellsomeone I'm going to make a picture about this because I think in a way that would
destroy the mystery and the authenticity of what is going to develop. And I have to be in
the moment and kind of respond to what the picture is telling me. In a way, I'm kind of aguardian or an enabler, but not necessarily a driving force with an end goal in mind. And
I think we’re the same in research. We have to be open to maybe something
unexpected coming up in our research and thinking, "Okay, well, that wasn't what I
expected, but I might have to go along that path and see whether it takes mesomewhere new." Yeah, I like it.
OM: Definitely. So, you went to university, they didn't teach mokuhanga, you joined theswim team; how did you arrive at mokuhanga?
WGH: So, I took the money and I ran away. I did that. I enrolled as a private student tothe university which I had originally been promised a place in, Kyoto Seika University,
because Kurosaki Akira, the amazing print artist of the 20th century, was the head of thedepartment there. And he is an incredible mokuhanga artist. He passed away a coupleof years ago, but I regard him as the 'Print God'. So, I went there to study. And once
again, it was not what I expected from having been to university in the west. I foundmyself carrying his books. I found myself really having to attend to learning by watching
and absorbing, because things weren't explained in a verbal linear sense in the way that
I expected. So, I learnt to copy his movements. And I think there's probably a whole
range of people who have copied his movements and have disseminated that copied
Copyright © 2022 Oliver Moxham, ℗ 2022 Oliver Moxham. May be freely distributed for education
purposes.
7

movement to their students, which is really interesting. The lineage of how we learn isprobably traceable back to certain masters who have taught key teachers.
So, I learnt how to make mokuhanga Japanese woodblock technique. It's very simple.
It's a printing technique that involves water. So, you wet the block. It's a wood block,and you add a little bit of glue, and then you put some paint on it and you brush it in witha bamboo brush that has deer and horse hair, pig hair, very low tech. And then you use
damp paper, which you press on the back with hand pressure to transfer the pigmentfrom the wood to the fibres of the paper. And it's So, simple, and yet it's So, difficult. It's
kind of one of those things like learning to play the guitar. If you describe it in words, itsounds like a fairly straightforward premise, but you realize very quickly that it's all down
to humidity and tempo and pressure and evenness and maybe kind of very sensitive
way of handling your tools. And suddenly you realize there's a real kind of unspoken art
form to being able to produce a flat area of colour or to produce a certain effect.
OM: It sounds like a very practical knowledge rather than something you read and learn
from a book.
WGH: Definitely, and that's actually what my PhD is about. It's about capturing what I
call 'tacit knowledge', the knowledge that we know in our bodies, and we find very hardto put into words. And my recent obsession is with gomazuri, the 'sesame seed' effect.
Have you heard of this?
OM: That's new to me.
Copyright © 2022 Oliver Moxham, ℗ 2022 Oliver Moxham. May be freely distributed for education
purposes.
8

WGH: So, sesame seed effect is this really beautiful effect that happens with Japanese
woodblock. And it happens when you don't have that much glue and you have quite a
lot of water in your mix. And it often happens at the beginning of the printing session
when you first made your block and you just started printing. And it happens a lot with
beginners as well. And what happens is the colour just splits into little islands of intensecolour and then less colour, So, they look like a field of sesame seed grains that havebeen flung over the surface of the paper. And almost every textbook that I read says,"Well, you just need to practise, and you'll soon be able to master this elusivetechnique" or "Don't worry about this flaw. You'll get better soon." So, it's a very kind
expression of encouraging people to try a little harder. And "don't worry, it'll go away.
When you know how to print, when you figure out how your body works and how all thematerials work, you'll know how to get rid of this unwanted effect." But at the beginningof the 20th century, the mokuhanga, the Japanese woodblock print technique, became
used by a lot of creative printmakers, and a lot of them deliberately used this sesame
seed effect to indicate to the audience that it was hand-printed, that it was a handmade,genuinely hand-printed item.
And it has this really wonderful 1920s kind of vibe about it. It's got this very lovely
vibrating field of colour. And if you put another colour on top, you'll get this incredible
optical pixelated effect that gives images real depth. And it has been used by many
artists since as a creative technique. And Kurosaki used it a lot in his work as well. So,
I've been interested in defining exactly what goes into making a gomazuri sesame seedeffect print. Exactly how much water do you need? How much glue do you need? How
Copyright © 2022 Oliver Moxham, ℗ 2022 Oliver Moxham. May be freely distributed for education
purposes.
9

much pressure do you need? And can we reproduce it and how can we quantify it? So,that's been my current kind of obsession with this very beautiful effect.
OM: So, you started off printing with linocuts and then learned mokuhanga. How was it
going from that skill to another? Are they quite transferable or is it a whole different kindof knowledge?
WGH: Yeah, I think when you think in print making terms, there are a lot of similarities.
So, both linocut and Japanese woodblock are relief prints. So, the ink goes on thesurface of the block, and you carve away everything you want to keep white. So, you're
working in reverse. So, all your actions are in removing something and everything thatyou make will come out as a mirror image when you print it. So, it's going to be reversed
left to right. So, you have this kind of back to front way of thinking and approaching yourimage which becomes yeah, it's very transferable. You can use your Lino skills for yourJapanese block skills and vice versa.
OM: Definitely. So, can you tell us a bit more about your fellow mokuhanga students
and what their motivations were for attending?
WGH: Ah right, in the class? Well, at Kyoto Seika University, which is a great liberal arts
college in the north of Kyoto, they had a really strong set of studies for ancient crafts like
paper making and mokuhanga, as well as a more contemporary print making
techniques like lithography and etching and so on. So, a lot of the students would comein as a print major and they would do all the different techniques and then they'd slowly
specialize to mokuhanga, or Japanese woodblock. I don't know about their motivations,
Copyright © 2022 Oliver Moxham, ℗ 2022 Oliver Moxham. May be freely distributed for education
purposes.
10

but for sure, there's this incredible range of effects that you can get with woodblock thatis impossible in other techniques, such as screen print. For example, the colour sits
inside the fibres of the paper. So, there's this really beautiful glow to the image because
the colour is deep in a way. There's a real tactility to the print. A lot of people printed flat
colour and then speckled colour on top. So, you had this little depth as well, thesevarying levels of register as to where the image is at and there are a few people who
were experimental printmakers. For example, this incredible artist from China whoeverybody called by his Japanese version of his Chinese name, Chang Ke. And heused to print on unsized paper.
So, if you print on paper that doesn't have size on it, the pigment will bleed. It's likeprinting on toilet paper. Like you get this incredible, like, wicking of your pigment awayfrom where you printed. So, you print this very loose image and then he would takesome size, which is called Dosa, which is like rabbit skin glue or Ox tendon glue andpaint it on the surface of the paper and then print again. So, he had this really beautiful
range of marks, some of which were very misty and loose and soft because he wasprinting as if the paper couldn't hold the image where it was placed. And then he would
contrast that with a very crisp image on top. So, his work was really inspiring. I think
everyone was playing with material and pigment and trying to learn this technique that's
very physical.
OM: Fascinating. I'm sort of curious about how these traditional techniques are taught
because Japan is a nation that is very interested in preserving its cultural heritage andCopyright © 2022 Oliver Moxham, ℗ 2022 Oliver Moxham. May be freely distributed for education
purposes.
11

that includes living national treasures, making sure that traditional crafts continue as
they have done for generations. And so, to hear that there's all this experimentation
going on with mokuhanga is a bit surprising, I guess, for me.
WGH: Yeah, you're right. But I really wonder because I think Kurosaki bridged old andnew techniques with incredible skill. He was fascinated with finding a way of making aphotographic woodblock prints. And when I was there, I remember they used to screen
print glue onto the surface of the block and then put the block inside a sandblastingmachine and sandblast the block down. It took hours. You'd have your gloves on andyour mask on, [it was] really noisy, and then take the block out, remove the PVA glue,
and then print it as a water-based print. And a couple of my fellow students, I think
Kawabata Chie, she made some beautiful work. I remember using that technique. It's
kind of like how can we use an old technique in a way that also, resounds with thecontemporary artist, the person who has a cell phone and the person who loves
photography. How can we use that?
I think we talked earlier about heritage and using culture after the [Asia-Pacific] war tothink about your core belief systems. And I think there is a big movement of what theycall shinhanga, ‘new print’ mokuhanga artists who make images in the traditional Ukiyoe style of printing and their work also, has a nostalgic quality to the depiction of light andthe depiction of countryside and nature and the elements, which is conveyed by the factthat the technique which is used is a technique that was commonly used in the 18th and19th century. And it speaks to us. It kind of reverberates with our notions of oldCopyright © 2022 Oliver Moxham, ℗ 2022 Oliver Moxham. May be freely distributed for education
purposes.
12

fashioned beauty and peace and landscape and appreciating the seasons because ofits kind of quality, surface quality. So, we need to make a new language for ourcontemporary age.
OM: I think it sounds like a real mix in the tools being used in the materials as well. You
have on the one hand these horse hair, boar hair brushes and ox tendon glue, but you
also, have someone using sandblasters. So, it seems like, again, quite a mix of the
traditional and the modern going on.
WGH: Yeah, I did a workshop recently in the British Museum, which was called Inspiredby Hokusai, and Hokusai was a complete genius. And I'm nowhere near anywhere,
even a hundredth as able as he was. But I found myself in the funny position of runninga workshop for beginners. And I thought, "well, how many people will come?" And theysaid, "well, it could be anywhere between 100-200 people." And I thought, "well, okay, I
can't carve the same block ten times with amazing precision, but I can ask a machine tohelp me." So, I carved and designed a block, and then I got a laser engraving company
to laser engrave eight more blocks. And while it wasn't perfect, the sensation of printing
from a block that a machine had carved was probably as fun as printing from a blockthat had been hand carved. It made it really accessible to the audience. And I think they
had a lot of fun because you could actually feel and smell and touch and hear and kindof really get inky and get involved in the printing process. So, yeah, for sure, technology
is helping us as much as old style tools.
OM: Yeah, it sounds like a lot of fun. I wish I could have been there.
Copyright © 2022 Oliver Moxham, ℗ 2022 Oliver Moxham. May be freely distributed for education
purposes.
13

WGH: Well, I happily bring it up to Norwich and you can have a go. It's a portableworkshop now because it's my suitcase.

OM: Please do come down sometime. So, just to go back to the students in your classand your learning mokuhanga, were there many Japanese? Because it sounds likethere's quite a mix of Japanese students and overseas students.
Yeah, there were about ten Japanese students and about four overseas students. And I
remember my best friends weren't necessarily woodblock printmaking friends. So, it's
kind of funny, we don't think if you're doing this discipline that you're going to be bestfriends with somebody else who's doing the same discipline. I was actually very
stressed when I was there because I wanted to consume and be really good at
something that isn't very easy to be good at immediately. So, you end up really focusing
on your journey and not looking outwards to other people.
OM: I had a similar experience when I was studying in Kyoto. It's my year abroad and I
joined the Kendo [Japanese swordsmanship] Club to try out some sword fighting. And
they spent the first six months just learning how to step backwards and forwards in theproper manner.
WGH: I did that too, the shuffle, and I was terrified. I didn't want to be hit! So, I got into
the kiai [shouting], but I didn't want anyone to hit me So, I kind of, like, lean backwards alot.

Copyright © 2022 Oliver Moxham, ℗ 2022 Oliver Moxham. May be freely distributed for education
purposes.
14

OM: I didn't have much of a problem being hit, but when it actually came to the fighting,
I found I was quite reluctant to hit somebody else. It was a bit of a block to overcome.
And they kept having to lean forward, saying, "go on, you can hit me."So, having looked over your prints, including the fantastic "COVID Tales" series, youseem to have achieved a level of depth and perspective not typically seen in traditional
ukiyo-e prints associated with woodblock printing. I'm particularly impressed with theuse of reflections and mirrors to achieve this. Would you describe this as an adaptation
or a continuation of the traditional techniques that you were taught in Japan?
WGH: I think it's interesting because I studied history of art at school and at university.
So, I took a year off on the vet course to do history of art as well. And I think I have quite
a big training in Western composition from observing people I love, like Rembrandt[Harmenszoon van Rijn] and [Honoré] Daumier, [William] Hogarth, [Edward] Munch.
The way they make a narrative in a space is quite scenic. And kind of encourages theeye to rove around and see what's happening in that corner, what's in the shadows, forexample. So, I think that's quite a big influence, and it influenced me before I went toJapan. So, I know the Japanese have a different perspective system, which was parallel
perspective depiction of the world and with multiple vanishing points, because they havea scroll-based system like the Chinese perspectival approaches. So, it is a very different
kind of grounding, like a classical grounding.
But I'm fascinated by mirrors and windows because I think the print is like a window intoanother world. And in regard to your question, because I told you about having to
Copyright © 2022 Oliver Moxham, ℗ 2022 Oliver Moxham. May be freely distributed for education
purposes.
15

reverse everything and everything you carve away is white, not dark, it kind of makes
you think on a very metaphoric level, "where does the truth lie? Is it in the thing I keep oris it in the thing that I eliminate?" I draw myself lefthanded on the blocks that I've made.
And when I print, I come out as a righthanded person again. So, it's this kind of duality.
It's a natural duality because of a medium of print, you're asserting truth, but you had tolie in order to make the truth come out. You see what I mean? And in a way, a mirror
and stuff like that, too. We look at ourselves on Zoom and we see a mirror version,
because that's the face that we're familiar with in the mirror. And we're presented to theworld as the flipped version, the right way round, as it were. But we are mediated by thescreen, so, once again, you don't really know what I look like. You don't know how tall I
am or what I'm wearing, what trousers I'm wearing. You have this partial view and you
assume the rest. And I kind of like that sort of playful, ironic mystery behind making
partial views, partial mirrors and playing with that truth-lie duality in my images.
So, for example, are you talking about "Mirror, Mirror"? The print of a swimming poolchanging room? They didn't have a mirror, they had a piece of metal that was beaten
flat to act as a mirror because it was a very kind of Council-run swimming pool, so notparticularly rich. And I think this mirror has been there for a long time. So, you'd go to
the swimming pool, change in the changing room, you're getting ready for a swim. You'dwalk past this piece of metal and you would see a grotesque figure with a very dumpy
body and amazingly long arms, and it would really stop you in horror. Like, "is that reallyme? Is that what I look like? I know I'm going for a swim, So, I've got my swimming
Copyright © 2022 Oliver Moxham, ℗ 2022 Oliver Moxham. May be freely distributed for education
purposes.
16

costume on, but do I really look this disfigured?", for example. So, I kind of made thisprint because it's about that kind of humour. Maybe we do look like that. Maybe oureyes are wrong, maybe that's an accurate reflection of my inner soul. And the surface
value, the way that light hits the surface of my skin, is actually falsehood. You don't
know where the truth lies. Anyway, they upgraded and they bought a new mirror about ayear after I started swimming there.
So, I made another print about women hanging out in front of the mirrors, slightly
inspired by my time in Japan because I love the bath ritual. But the second print iscalled "She Doesn't Care If We Stare", and it's a picture of a woman who's changing infront of the mirror and she has no clothes on. And I know in Japan it's completely
normal to go to the bathhouse and have no clothes on and hang out together without
clothes on. But in the UK, for sure, there's a real sense of surprise and outrage andamusement and maybe embarrassment when you see somebody with no clothes on
who's really happy having no clothes on in a changing room, in a female space. And so,
I made this print about this lady who was just hanging out in front of the mirror with a lotof people looking at her in this very questioning way. So, it's about "why are we shy in
the UK? Why are people not shy in Japan?" Maybe that has been the one kind of thing
I've taken back from Japan that's made its way into a print. But yeah, why do we havethese different approaches?
OM: Just to go back to the Zoom perspective, there's something I find quite amusing.
I've been networking with people through Zoom over the last couple of years,
Copyright © 2022 Oliver Moxham, ℗ 2022 Oliver Moxham. May be freely distributed for education
purposes.
17

particularly through the podcast, meeting a lot of academics that way. And when I've
met people in person, they're quite shocked to see that I'm a fairly tall person, which
doesn't come across much from just head and shoulders, but also, I guess it means that
I don't sound like a tall person. Is there a way to sound like a tall person?
WGH: I'm not quite sure, but yeah, it definitely makes you think a lot about how muchyour physical appearance is different from your online appearance. I suppose. It's notjust that, isn't it? It's the quality of our voices and the fact that we still have a very acutesense of smell, even though it's not as good as dogs. And we probably respond to eachother's pheromones and body heat and microbiome and chemicals. Those things, weprobably exchange bacteria and we hang out within a meter of each other, and those
things probably affect how we feel about each other. And they're very hard to replicate
on the screen. Although we're getting used to it, I think we're getting better at it. Like ourtolerance level has increased, and in a way, it's become like a window instead of analien communication tool.
OM: So, I understand you're connected to a worldwide network of printmakers. How
widespread is mokuhanga and how should this international spread of the practicechallenge our understanding of it as a traditional Japanese art style?
WGH: Okay. I'm on the edges of the mokuhanga world because although I studied it inJapan 15 years ago, I mainly made linocuts, and I've just come back to it with my PhD.
But I recently attended this international conference, and there are about 100 people
there from all over the world. It actually ran through the time zone that ran for 48 hours
Copyright © 2022 Oliver Moxham, ℗ 2022 Oliver Moxham. May be freely distributed for education
purposes.
18

without a break. So, it started in Japan, and then it moved to Europe, and then it would
end up in North America and go round again and again. So, you just have to sleep andmiss one time zone in order to retain some sense of sanity. But it's definitely global.
There was a really beautiful talk on mokuhanga in, I think, Argentina (I'd have to lookthat up) where somebody had said that it was a really great technique, but she was apioneer in bringing it to schools. I think the appeal of the technique is that it's quite lowtech, So, you can adapt it. You can use Western print making papers. You can use
toothbrushes at a pinch. It would be terribly difficult, but you can use a toothbrush or ahairbrush or a shoe brush to print from. You can use watercolour paints, and you can
use wallpaper paste instead of traditional Japanese rice paste. So, the principle of thetechnique is portable and possible in the domestic sphere. And you'll see a lot of artists
from all over the world trying to make new approaches to printing discs.
There's a wonderful lady in Australia called Rosslyn Keane who's made these ballbearing ends, so ball bearing handheld printing discs that she sells across the world.
But they're like a handmade thing, like a solution to something because the traditional
object is hard to get. So, yeah, in a way, it's a principle as much as museum-stylepreserved craft heritage, it's a living expression, a living artistic expression. I don't know
how to say it properly, but something like that. It's kind of adapting to...
OM: It's organic?
WGH: Yes, organically evolving. And I had a lot of fun because I've been using fruit toscale to weigh my hand movements, to figure out how much pressure I put on the backCopyright © 2022 Oliver Moxham, ℗ 2022 Oliver Moxham. May be freely distributed for education
purposes.
19

of the block or using syringes to measure the amount of glue that I put on the block tosee "how much do we really put when we put an amount that feels right?" So, yes, thekind of ever adapting technique would be a little bit like a recipe for a stew, and you'reusing new ingredients.
OM: It seems to me like the shared root of heritage and the art form is the traditional
technique, but then they branch off where heritage tends to focus on preserving theoriginal technique, whereas the active artists like yourself are inspired by it and then go
on to adapt it to suit your own expressions.
WGH: Definitely. Yeah, I think that's good [summary.] And that's the test of a vibrant,
living language, isn't it? When new words crop up, new expressions, it shows you it's
being used and it's being practically adapted for convenience as well. So, I like it.
OM: Excellent. Well, thank you for answering all of my questions, Wuon-Gean. Before
we finish the episode, could you share with us any other projects that you're currently
working on?
WGH: Well, the "Diary of a Printmaker" prints that I made are going to be in a show inHong Kong next year as an entirety, and I've made about 170 of them, so it would benice to see them all in one place. And the V&A [Victoria & Albert Museum] just released
a film of me printing, so if you want to see me in my space making linocuts and printing
at home and in East London Printmakers, you can watch that video on YouTube. And
I'm part of this conference called the Impact Printmaking Conference, which we run at
the Centre for Print Research in Bristol. It's happening in September, and I have a panel
Copyright © 2022 Oliver Moxham, ℗ 2022 Oliver Moxham. May be freely distributed for education
purposes.
20

paper called "Meet Me at the Edge of Infinity", and it's all about how printmaking allows
you to lay down colour blends and gradients. One of the traditional words is bokashi,
which is the word for a gradient, and I love the way that it's an expression of
atmosphere and colour and shadow and mystery. So, I'm going to do a paper there in
September this year to which you are very welcome. So, a few things.
OM: Great. And if our listeners want to try one of your workshops, where can they findout more information about that?
WGH: So, I sometimes teach at East London Printmakers in London, and I'm giving aworkshop in Ditchling Museum of Art and Craft, I think, near Brighton sometime in June.
Do you know Frank Brangwyn and [Yoshijiro] Urushibara?
OM: I haven't heard them before.
WGH: So, Brangwyn was a Walthamstow artist and Urushibara was Japanese artist
who came over and lived in England for about a dozen years. And he collaborated with
Brangwyn, and they made beautiful prints, really beautiful prints. And so they're having
a big show from April, I think, and they've asked me to teach a workshop there. But
maybe we should make a date for a workshop in Norwich, and I'll come up with mysuitcase of blocks. We can do a crash course in printing and then try carving andmaking your own image. It would be fun.
OM: That'd be fantastic. I will get the ball rolling there. Thank you for joining me today,
Wuon-Gean, it's been a real pleasure.
Copyright © 2022 Oliver Moxham, ℗ 2022 Oliver Moxham. May be freely distributed for education
purposes.
21

WGH: Thank you for having me. It's been a pleasure, too.
OM: You can find a link to Wuon-Gean’s website in the description below. Don’t forget
to subscribe on JapanInNorwich.org or on your preferred podcast provider for updates
on new episodes. Join us for our next episode with Dr Viviana Andreescu, where we
discuss public opinion on capital punishment in Japan.
We hope you will join us then. Thank you for listening.

Copyright © 2022 Oliver Moxham, ℗ 2022 Oliver Moxham. May be freely distributed for education
purposes.
22