Biography
Kazuya Kanda (born 1975) is a Japanese silkscreen printmaker who works extensively with photographic source material. He completed graduate study at the Tokyo University of the Arts (Tokyo Geidai) in 2001, and his practice places him among mid-career Japanese screenprint specialists using photographic imagery as a printmaking register.
Kanda is a member of Kokugakai (国画会), one of the major Japanese independent art associations and a long-standing alternative to the official salon system. Kokugakai traces its origins to the Kokuga Sōsaku Kyōkai, founded in 1918 by Tsuchida Bakusen and other Nihonga painters; its annual Kokuten exhibitions at the Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum serve as a showcase for both painting and printmaking. Within the association's print section, Kanda was awarded the Kokugakai Prize in 2013.
In 2025 his silkscreen "lost image photograph 25-01" was included in the 68th CWAJ Print Show, the long-running juried exhibition and sale organized annually by the College Women's Association of Japan. The title reflects a recurring concern in his work with photographic memory, image loss, and the materiality of the photographic image, deploying silkscreen's capacity for tonal reproduction as a means of examining absent or degraded source material.
Beyond his Kokugakai record and this CWAJ Print Show entry, English-language documentation of Kanda's wider exhibition history and gallery representation remains limited.
Key Facts
- Active Period
- 1975
- Nationality
- 🇯🇵Japan
- Movement
- Contemporary Mokuhanga
- Subjects
- Silkscreen
- Works Indexed
- 1
Frequently Asked Questions
Kazuya Kanda (born 1975) is a Japanese silkscreen printmaker who works extensively with photographic source material. He completed graduate study at the Tokyo University of the Arts (Tokyo Geidai) in 2001, and his practice places him among mid-career Japanese screenprint specialists using photographic imagery as a printmaking register.
Kazuya Kanda was active born in 1975. They were associated with the Contemporary Mokuhanga movement.
Kazuya Kanda'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.
Kazuya Kanda's prints frequently feature silkscreen.