Shadow [from "Cloudy Weather, Fair Skies Later On"] かげ［『曇後晴』より］

Born in 1917 (Taisho 6) in Kumamoto prefecture, Hamada graduated from Tokyo Fine Arts School in 1939 and was immediately drafted into the army at the age of twenty-one. The following year, he was sent to continental China. He was drafted again in 1944, and remained in military service until the war ended. He started to work on copperplates in 1950. In the following five years, he produced works based on his experiences as a soldier including the 15 prints in the "Elegy of the Raw Recruit" series. Presenting the tragedies of war that befalls all parties involved in stoic black-and-white compositions, they won wide acclaim both inside and outside Japan as soon as they were first shown. One of them, "Standing Watch" from Elegy of the Raw Recruit won the second prize at "The 4th International Print Exhibition in Lugano" of 1956. From around this year, he started to produce works that capture the anxieties and injustices of contemporary society with a sharp eye, and also started to participate in many international exhibitions with these works. In 1962, he won the Fukushima Award at "The 5th Contemporary Art Exhibition" with his Insane Man. In his copperplate portfolios "The Man Who Sees" and "Cloudy But Sunny Later", he takes advantage of the sequential form to explore various conditions of human existence in contemporary society and presents them in a symbolic style. Though his works are based on acute insight into the workings of society and politics as well as detached observation of human foolishness, they are also always imbued with fraternal love and humor. Almost all of his works, including the earliest ones, are in monochrome, and the techniques used are also limited to etching, aquatint, mezzotint, and drypoint. Created within these limitations, his concise and subdued expression makes starkly clear what is most important in the captured scene.