Keisuke Serizawa1895~1984 芹沢銈介

Serizawa Keisuke was a Japanese textile artist born on May 13, 1895, in Shizuoka City to a kimono wholesaler family. After graduating from Tokyo Higher Technical School he worked in design instruction and commercial design at the Shizuoka Prefectural Industrial Laboratory. In 1928, encounters with Yanagi Soetsu’s mingei philosophy and Okinawan bingata stencil dyeing turned him toward textile art, and he developed his distinctive katazome (stencil-dyeing) style. In 1956 he was designated a Living National Treasure as the holder of the Important Intangible Cultural Property “katazome,” and in 1976–77 a major “Serizawa” exhibition was held at the Grand Palais in Paris. He died of heart failure at Toranomon Hospital in Tokyo on April 5, 1984, at the age of 88.