Biography
Konomi Honda (born 1987, Hyogo Prefecture) is a Japanese woodblock printmaker whose practice centres on small-format multicolour water-based woodcuts of overlooked everyday objects, with thematic attention to disappearance — the moment when a familiar lamp, a wrinkled shirt, a piece of paper packaging, or a small flying insect is on the verge of being lost from notice. She trained at Kyoto Seika University, completing the printmaking (woodblock) course in 2010 and continuing as a research student in printmaking the following year.
From 2012 Honda also worked at BOX & NEEDLE, a Kyoto specialty box and paper-products studio, where she handled package and pattern design — work that overlaps directly with the visual register of her printmaking, which is closer in feel to elegant book-craft and stationery design than to the monumental gestural mode of senior Japanese woodcut. Her solo and group exhibitions have been concentrated in Kyoto, particularly through Gallery Morning Kyoto, where she has been a recurring exhibitor across more than a decade, including the woodcut exhibition '風 / Wind' (2018–19). Her 2023 showcase work '点灯虫' (Tentou Mushi / Lighting Bug) — a 60.4 × 45.3 cm water-based multicolour woodcut in an edition of ten — is representative: a small-scale, carefully observed insect motif printed in luminous transparent layers.
Honda's artist-statement framing centres on the everyday objects that are quietly disappearing as time passes, and on the way the landscapes and human feelings shaped by such objects persist in memory after the objects themselves are gone. Her woodcuts apply this attention indiscriminately to the natural and the manufactured: a leaf, a piece of wrinkled clothing, a faded lamp.
Beyond her individual woodcut practice, Honda is also active as a member of 'puntas,' a paper-production unit she formed with friends alongside her design work. The unit produces handmade-paper objects and small editions, extending her print sensibility into book and paper-craft. She is represented primarily through Gallery Morning Kyoto and has also exhibited at Galerie OVO in Taipei, giving her work modest circulation beyond Japan.
Honda belongs to the cohort of Kyoto Seika printmaking graduates active in the 2010s — a tightly networked group producing small-format water-based woodcut for a Kansai-area audience interested in stationery-scale, design-adjacent printmaking. Her recurring solo exhibitions at Gallery Morning Kyoto since the early 2010s mark her as a steady career artist with a clearly developed visual identity, working in characteristically small editions.
Key Facts
- Active Period
- 1987
- Nationality
- 🇯🇵Japan
- Movement
- Contemporary Mokuhanga
- Works Indexed
- 1
Frequently Asked Questions
Konomi Honda (born 1987, Hyogo Prefecture) is a Japanese woodblock printmaker whose practice centres on small-format multicolour water-based woodcuts of overlooked everyday objects, with thematic attention to disappearance — the moment when a familiar lamp, a wrinkled shirt, a piece of paper packaging, or a small flying insect is on the verge of being lost from notice. She trained at Kyoto Seika University, completing the printmaking (woodblock) course in 2010 and continuing as a research student in printmaking the following year.
Konomi Honda was active born in 1987. They were associated with the Contemporary Mokuhanga movement.
Konomi Honda'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.