Emiko Aida

Emiko Aida (born 1956, Tokyo) is a Japanese-born painter and printmaker based in London who is best known for her atmospheric aquatints and Japanese woodblock prints. She grew up in Jindai-ji, a temple district in western Tokyo associated with a long-revered water shrine — an early proximity to running water that she has cited as the wellspring for the aquatic imagery that pervades her mature work.

Aida received her undergraduate training in Fine Art at Tokyo University of Art and Design between 1978 and 1982, then continued at Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music (Tokyo Geijutsu Daigaku), where she completed a Master of Arts in 1984. After teaching briefly at her alma mater she relocated to London in the late 1980s to pursue a second postgraduate course at the Royal College of Art, completing an MA in Printmaking. London became her permanent base, and she has spent more than three decades working there as a painter, printmaker, and mixed-media artist.

Her signature medium is aquatint, an intaglio process that allows for the broad tonal washes and dissolving edges she uses to evoke water in motion. Recurring subjects include swimmers seen from above and below the surface, rain, falling petals, koinobori carp streamers, domestic cats, and birds rendered in homage to Edo painters such as Itō Jakuchū and the printmaker Suzuki Harunobu. Although aquatint dominates her output, she is fluent in Japanese woodblock printmaking (mokuhanga) and combines the two in some series. Alongside printmaking she maintains a painting practice on canvas, layering pigment to explore the same themes of water, nature, and belonging that run through her prints.

Aida's award history extends back to her student years in Tokyo, where she received Japan University of Printmaking Purchase Prizes in 1982 and 1983. After moving to London she won the L'Escargot Restaurant Award at the Royal College of Art in 1989 and the Nordstern Award at the Royal Academy of Arts Summer Exhibition in 1997. She subsequently received the Coley & Tiley Prize at the Royal Birmingham Society of Artists in 1998 and 1999, a Purchase Prize at the 16th SPACE International Print Biennial in Seoul in 2014, and the Vivien Leigh Bequest Prize at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford the same year. More recent honours include selection for the Columbia Threadneedle Prize Exhibition in 2018, finalist status in the Circle Foundation Artist of the Year (France) in 2020, and the International PEGASUS Prize for the Arts in Italy in 2021.

Aida is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Painter-Printmakers (RE), the historic London-based society of original printmakers founded in 1880, and shows annually at its members' exhibitions at Bankside Gallery on the South Bank. She is also a member of Greenwich Printmakers and South Bank Printmakers. In addition to her independent studio practice she has held teaching positions at the Royal College of Art and Hampstead School of Art in London, where she has taught etching and Japanese woodblock printmaking.

Her work is held in public collections including the Victoria and Albert Museum (London), the Ashmolean Museum (Oxford), the New York Public Library, and the Guangdong Museum of Art (China). She has exhibited at the Florence Biennale (2007), the Kochi International Triennial in Japan (1990), the Qijiang International Print Exhibition in China (2010), the Venice Art Biennale (2019), the London Original Print Fair, Mandell's Gallery in Norwich, and successive RE Original Prints exhibitions at Bankside Gallery. Her work has been profiled in Printmakers Today (2010) and Contemporary Art Curator Magazine, and she was included in a 50 Artists to Watch feature in 2023.