Furuya Hiroko

Furuya Hiroko (古屋博子, also rendered 古谷博子 in some Japanese sources) was born in Tokyo in 1961 and is a professor in the Printmaking specialization within the Department of Painting at Tama Art University (Tama Bijutsu Daigaku), one of the leading private art universities in Japan. She received both her undergraduate and graduate training at Tama Art University — graduating from the Department of Painting in the Oil Painting specialization in 1986 and completing the master's programme in Painting at the Tama Art University Graduate School in 1988 — and joined the Tama Art University faculty, where she has held a professorship in the Printmaking specialization since 2014. Her research and studio practice, described in her university faculty profile as an investigation of the diverse characteristics of printmaking centred on woodblock, gives particular attention to the material qualities of Japanese paper and the role of negative space (yohaku), and sits inside the larger postwar Japanese tradition in which woodblock practice is treated as a continuous medium of inquiry rather than a fixed style. Her recognition began early: she received the Yamaguchi Gen New Artist Prize at the 56th exhibition of the Japan Print Association (Nihon Hanga Kyōkai) in 1988, was named a government-sponsored research artist (Geijutsuka Kokunai Kenshū-in) in 1990 — a programme administered by the Agency for Cultural Affairs that supports advanced study by working artists — and later received a runner-up prize (準大賞) at the Kōchi International Print Triennial in 2008. Her exhibition history includes the curated survey Mokuhanga: From the End of the Meiji Period to the Present (Nerima Ward Museum of Art, 1992) and the retrospective One Hundred Years of Japanese Woodblock Prints (Nagoya City Art Museum, 2004), the latter a central institutional account of the sōsaku-hanga lineage into which her own practice flows. She has also participated in international print exhibitions in South Korea (2007), Taiwan (2011), Turkey (2012), Canada (2014), Croatia (2015), Poland (2017) and China (2021), among others, and her work is held principally in Japanese institutional and university collections. She belongs to the generation of women printmakers who have helped make Tama Art University one of the strongest centres of contemporary mokuhanga teaching in Japan.

Furuya Hiroko was active born in 1961. They were associated with the Contemporary Mokuhanga movement.

Furuya Hiroko's work was shaped by the Contemporary Mokuhanga tradition in Japanese woodblock printmaking. Contemporary Mokuhanga: Contemporary mokuhanga (literally "wood-block print") encompasses artists working from approximately 1970 to the present who continue or reinvent traditional Japanese woodblock printing techniques.

Furuya Hiroko's prints frequently feature landscapes, rivers & lakes.

Original prints by Furuya Hiroko can be found in collections including Art Institute of Chicago.