Mizuki Ashikawa

Mizuki Ashikawa (born 1994, Shizuoka Prefecture) is a Japanese printmaker whose practice is anchored in lithography — the planographic, chemical-resist tradition of nineteenth-century European print — used at scale to depict urban infrastructure, civil-engineering forms, and the recurring 'small figure in vast landscape' motif derived from manga visual register. The combination — lithographic technique applied to manga-style figural composition at architectural scale — distinguishes her work from peers and has produced a recognisable mature voice.

Ashikawa earned her MFA in Printmaking at Musashino Art University in 2019 and continued in the same program for further fellowship work. Her early award profile is dense: she received the Art Award Tokyo Marunouchi 2019 (Mitsubishi Estate Prize), Second Prize at the AOMORI TRIENNALE 2017, the Purchase Prize at the 42nd Annual Exhibition of the Japan Society of Printmaking, and selection at the Shell Art Award Exhibition. The combination of a major emerging-artist-prize win (Marunouchi), a regional-triennial second prize (Aomori), and a Japan Society of Printmaking purchase prize establishes her as a serious early-career figure in the late 2010s Japanese print scene.

Her mature solo exhibition is the 2019 'TOKAS-Emerging 2019: From Out of Range' at Tokyo Arts and Space Hongo (Tokyo). Ashikawa held a 2022 residency under the Tokyo Arts and Space Local Creator Residency Program with the theme 'Festival Traces,' originally planned around Olympic Games festivities and reimagined post-pandemic as a research project into Tokyo's Olympic-related landscapes — Olympic Village on the Tokyo Bay landfills, the Central Breakwater Outer Landfill Site, Yumenoshima-park, Wakasu-park, Uminomori-park. The output works include 'Public and me' (2022, lithograph on paper, 18 x 18 cm), 'Critical park 2022' (2022, lithograph on paper, 57.8 x 77.5 cm), 'Tiny guys' (2022, lithograph on paper, 18 x 18 cm), and three 'Untitled' inkjet prints (2022) documenting the Olympic-site research.

Ashikawa was selected for the 3rd PATinKyoto Print Art Triennale 2022 with a major commissioned work — a 156-sheet wall installation arranged 13 sheets across by 12 down on A3 lithograph blocks, depicting steep-terrain reinforcement structures populated by manga-style figures. The work scale (156 sheets) and its deliberate engineering-and-figure subject distinguish her PATinKyoto contribution.

Group exhibitions include 'Translation of 3 Vision of Printmaking' at Silpakorn University, Thailand (2018), 'Takeda Art / Help Overcoming' at venues in St. Petersburg and Moscow (2018), 'View from There' at Gallery Natsuka Tokyo (2019), Sunny Nook for Diversion at Openletter Gallery Tokyo (2020), and 'All of Being Put in Parentheses' at the Mitsubishi Ichigokan Museum Archive Room Tokyo (2020). Her positioning is as a Tokyo-based mid-career lithographer whose engineering-meets-manga subject matter and large-scale wall installation mode have produced one of the more visually distinctive bodies of work among 2010s Japanese print graduates.