Michiko Hoshino

Michiko Hoshino (born 1934, Tokyo) is a Japanese painter and printmaker whose lithographic practice, sustained since the early 1970s, has produced one of the most cosmopolitan bodies of contemporary Japanese print work — a long sequence of richly textured lithographs that take the literary world of the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges as their primary intellectual and visual scaffolding. She studied liberal arts at Tokyo Women's Christian University, completing a B.A. in 1954, then switched to art and entered the Tokyo University of the Arts (Tokyo Geidai) oil painting course, graduating with her B.A. in oil painting in 1963.

For the first nine years after graduating Hoshino exhibited oil paintings, primarily through the Mainichi Contemporary Art Exhibition in Tokyo. In 1972 she shifted to printmaking and committed almost exclusively to lithography, a decision that reshaped her work toward the multi-stone, layered, atmospherically grey-and-bone-white surfaces that would become her hallmark. Her early prints from the late 1970s onward articulate, in her own description, "memory, time, and spatial form" — using Borges's literary architecture (the labyrinth, the library, the universal book, mirrored time) as a bridge for what she has called her external communication with viewers.

From 1977 she began appearing regularly in the European print biennials — Ljubljana, Kraków, Budapest, Maastricht, Campinas (Brazil), the Egypt international print competitions, and several Chinese print biennials. The 1990s marked an intensification of her Borges-themed work: in 1989 she mounted a Borges Memorial Exhibition at the Stripe House Museum in Tokyo following the writer's death, in 1994 she had a solo show at the National Print Museum (Museo Nacional del Grabado) in Buenos Aires, and in 2001 she presented in New York. Her lithographs from this period, including Dissolving Perspective — Fragments (1995, 91 × 188.5 cm) and the Roses Remembering series (Roses Remembering IV: Journey of Exploration, 2007; Roses Remembering IX: Distant Record, 2009), establish the large horizontal panoramic format that defines her mature work.

Hoshino's prints are held in the British Museum (London), the United States Library of Congress, the Museum of Modern History Ljubljana (Slovenia), the National Museum Kraków, the Tesalonica Museum (Greece), the Felicien Rops Museum (Belgium), the Universal Print Museum (Egypt), the Museo Nacional del Grabado (Argentina), and the Foundation International Jorge Luis Borges (Argentina), among many other institutions. The Argentine collections are particularly notable — she is one of the very few Japanese printmakers whose work is collected systematically by Latin American print museums.

She is a member of the Kokugakai Art Association, the Japan Artist Association, and the Japan Print Association, and continues to maintain a working studio in Tokyo. The 2006 monograph Michiko Hoshino: All Prints Collection (published by her own studio) catalogues her output from 1972 through the early 2000s and remains the principal biographical reference; CWAJ Print Show selections in Tokyo and the Annex Galleries / Daniel Lienau collection records in the United States complete her published documentation.