Print artist. Asada was an adopted name; his original family name was Nakanishi. He was born in Kameoka, near Kyoto, and received his artistic education at the Kyoto Shiritsu Bijutsu Kogei Gakko (Kyoto City School of Fine Arts and Crafts) and the Kyoto Shiritsu Kaiga Senmon Daigaku (Kyoto City Specialist School of Painting) from which he graduated in 1924. In 1921 he first exhibited at the Teiten (Imperial Exhibition). He got to know the leaders of the 'Sosaku Hanga' movement and published in the magazine 'Han' (Prints, 1928-9), together with his fellow Kyoto artist Tokuriki Tomiki-chiro (q.v.). At the same period he began to study native-style painting under the Kyoto artist Nishimura Goun (1887-1938). He was a co-founder in 1929 of the Kyoto Creative Print Society with Tokuriki, Asano Takeji (b.1900) and others. With these two he designed the series 'Creative Prints of the Twelve Months in new Kyoto' (1930), a Kyoto answer to the Tokyo-dominated 'Sosaku Hanga' world. He became a member of the Japanese Print Society in 1932 and participated in 'One Hundred New Views of Japan' (1987, 0316, 0459). After 1945 he worked only as a painter in the 'Nihonga' style, much influenced by the work of Yamaguchi Kayo (1899-1984), a fellow-pupil of Goun's and specialising in 'kacho' (bird-and-flower) subjects.
