For immediate release

Kenichi Kuriyagawa: Four Seasons — The Year He Got His Sight Back

Thirty silkscreen prints made in 1988

August 7 – September 2, 2026
Opening reception Friday, August 7, 5–8 pm, during the Castro Art Walk
Art House SF · 2324 Market Street, San Francisco, CA 94114

SAN FRANCISCO, August 3, 2026 — In 1986, a 75-year-old designer in Sapporo had cataract surgery and got his colour vision back. What he did next was go and look at Hokkaido again.

Over the following two years Kenichi Kuriyagawa made fifty silkscreen prints of the island he had been drawing for half a century — drift ice breaking up in April, cranes over Kushiro Marsh, birch woods, dairy pasture at dusk. The colours are extreme: a lime-green sky over red mountains, a lake in purple and hot pink, an orange sea. He then laid all fifty out and asked his family which ones they liked. Thirty made the cut.

Those thirty open at Art House SF on August 7.

“The four seasons in Hokkaido are always different,” Kuriyagawa wrote at the time. “It makes us realize just how tiny we humans are in comparison to the greatness of nature. Still, I can’t suppress the urge to draw.” He described the prints as a small gift to the nature of his hometown, made while savouring the joy of regaining his eyesight.

Kenichi Kuriyagawa (1911–1999) never attended art school. In 1934 the Great Hakodate Fire destroyed the shop where he painted cinema signboards; he moved to Sapporo, took work at a printing house, and there received the only formal art instruction of his life. Two years later he won the Sapporo Railway Bureau’s open poster competition, and the commissions did not stop for forty years.

He designed the Hokkaido prefectural flag and emblem, chosen from more than 7,500 submissions and promulgated in 1967 — still flying over the prefecture today. He drew the first Sapporo Snow Festival poster in 1950, a design used for eight consecutive years. He made the mosaic mural in Sapporo Station and the platform walls on two subway lines, and drew the provincial broadcaster’s calendar for 24 consecutive years. His tourism posters took the top prize at the World Tourism Poster Competition twice, at Lisbon in 1953 and Vienna in 1956. He received the Order of the Rising Sun in 1992. For four decades, if you were Japanese and you pictured Hokkaido, you were probably picturing something Kuriyagawa had drawn.

In 1982 Kodansha published his collected work, with forewords by the Governor of Hokkaido, the designer of the Tokyo 1964 Olympic posters, and the novelist Seichō Matsumoto — who wrote that as a young newspaper design clerk entering poster contests, Kuriyagawa was the one rival his circle could never beat.

Outside Japan he is almost unknown.

None of the posters are in this exhibition. 234 of Kuriyagawa’s works are held by the Hokkaido Museum of Modern Art and three by the Olympic Museum in Lausanne. The 1988 silkscreens are the only work by Kuriyagawa a private collector can own.

“He’d spent his whole life drawing Hokkaido for somebody — the railway, the prefecture, the Olympics,” said Max Khusid, founder of Art House SF, who travelled to Sapporo in October 2025 to meet Kuriyagawa’s granddaughter, Ai Ueno. “These thirty he made for himself, right after he got his sight back. You can see it in the colour.”

Each print is shown with Kuriyagawa’s own writing on the season it depicts, drawn from the afterword to his 1982 monograph. Twenty works are on view at a time, with pieces rotating during the run. The exhibition is free and open to the public and runs through September 2. It opens with a reception on Friday, August 7, from 5 to 8 pm, during the Castro Art Walk. Gallery hours are Wednesday to Saturday, 11 am to 7 pm, and Sunday, 11 am to 5 pm. Prints range from $1,050 to $3,000. The gallery will also host two small-group talks on Kuriyagawa’s life and work during the run, limited to twelve people each; details at arthousesf.com.

Links

• RSVP: opening reception on Eventbrite
• Exhibition page: Kenichi Kuriyagawa: Four Seasons
• Press images, 300 dpi with captions and credit lines: Google Drive folder

About Art House SF

An independent gallery at 2324 Market Street representing artists from more than twenty countries, including Japan, Iceland, Georgia, South Africa, Ukraine, Nepal and Uzbekistan. The gallery works directly with the Kuriyagawa estate in Sapporo.

Press contact

Max Khusid · max@arthousesf.com · (412) 260-5436

###