For immediate release

Yowsaku Sekino: The Printmaker Japan's Empress Chose

Hanakotoba: The Language of Flowers — Japanese woodblock prints in gold leaf

October 2 – November 1, 2026
Gallery talks Thursday, October 29, 6:30 pm and Saturday, October 31, 2 pm
Art House SF · 2324B Market Street, San Francisco, CA 94114

SAN FRANCISCO, October 15, 2026 — On October 29, 2015, Empress Michiko attended the opening of the 60th College Women's Association of Japan Print Show in Tokyo. She chose one print to take home to the Imperial Palace: Sakura, a cherry tree in full bloom, outlined in gold leaf by Yowsaku Sekino.

Eleven years later to the day, Art House SF founder Max Khusid will lead the first of two small-group talks on Sekino's work in San Francisco. Twenty of his prints are on view through November 1. This is Sekino's second solo exhibition at the gallery; his first, in November 2025, was also his first outside Japan. Each talk is limited to fifteen people; admission is $10, credited toward any purchase.

Hanga Geijutsu, Japan's leading print magazine, profiled Sekino in its Autumn 2026 issue. Fifteen years earlier, its editor, Tatsuo Matsuyama, had named him an artist to watch.

“The printmaker who currently possesses the most complete command of technique and expression is Yowsaku Sekino.”

— Tatsuo Matsuyama, Hanga Geijutsu, 2011 (translated from Japanese)

He did not set out to be an artist.

Sekino was born in Tokyo in 1944, the son of Jun'ichirō Sekino, one of Japan's leading postwar printmakers, whose work is in the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, the Museum of Modern Art and the British Museum. Yowsaku took a science and engineering degree and a company job. In 1971 he quit to become his father's technical assistant — preparing plates, carving color blocks, printing — and stayed seventeen years. His father was a genius, he has said, and he was not. He began exhibiting under his own name in 1984, and Nihonbashi Takashimaya in Tokyo has given him regular solo exhibitions since 2007. An impression of his Black Peonies, on view in the exhibition, is in the collection of the Library of Congress.

Sekino works in the tradition of sōsaku-hanga, or “creative prints,” the movement his father helped lead in postwar Japan. Ukiyo-e had been a workshop product: one man drew the design, another carved the blocks, a third printed them. The sōsaku-hanga artists insisted on doing all three themselves, and Sekino still does. Few printmakers today carry that principle as far.

He uses no key block. Instead he overprints ten or more blocks, which by his count can produce 1,023 colors. He carves in hard cherry wood and works textures with a wire brush, a tool borrowed from his father's copperplate etching. For the gold, he prints outlines in oil-based ink, presses gold leaf onto the wet sheet, waits about a month, then brushes the excess away. One print takes about three months.

The exhibition is built around hanakotoba, the Japanese language of flowers, in which every bloom carries a message. The peony stands for nobility. The sunflower says “I only have eyes for you.” The phalaenopsis orchid promises that happiness is flying your way. He paints flowers, he has said, because he wants prints that belong in a home: landscape, form and color in one subject.

The talks trace Japanese prints from ukiyo-e to Van Gogh to Steve Jobs, and end with questions in front of the prints.

The show is free and open to the public through November 1. Gallery hours are Wednesday to Saturday, 11 am to 7 pm, and Sunday, 11 am to 5 pm. Prints range from $1,200 to $9,500.

Links

• RSVP: gallery talks on Eventbrite
• Exhibition page: Hanakotoba: The Language of Flowers
• Press images with captions and credit lines: Google Drive folder. Print-resolution files on request, same day.

About Art House SF

An independent gallery at 2324B Market Street, founded in 2019. Founder Max Khusid finds its artists by traveling to meet them where they work, from Bukhara and Tbilisi to Sapporo and Lo Manthang, Nepal.

Press contact

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

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