Kazuya Kanda

Kazuya Kanda (born 1975, Hyogo Prefecture) is a Japanese silkscreen printmaker with a sustained practice based in Tokyo. His selection in the 68th CWAJ Print Show in 2025 with 'lost image photograph 25-01,' a 66 × 51 cm silkscreen, places him within the cohort of mid-career Japanese silkscreen specialists working with photographic source material as a print register.

Kanda received his foundational training at Kyoto City University of Arts (KCUA), one of the two top-tier Japanese art universities outside Tokyo, and continued through the graduate program at Tokyo University of the Arts (Geidai), the leading Japanese art university. The KCUA-then-Geidai trajectory is unusual and confirms that Kanda's training crossed the principal Japanese print pedagogical divide between the Kansai and Tokyo schools — a relatively rare formation for working printmakers.

His principal teachers include Hideki Kimura (KCUA) and Hiroko Nimura (Geidai). Kimura is a senior figure on the Kyoto City University of Arts printmaking faculty; Nimura is a senior teacher at Tokyo University of the Arts. The dual mentorship under Kimura and Nimura situates Kanda within two of the principal Japanese contemporary print teaching lineages — a particularly rich pedagogical foundation for working artists.

Kanda is a member of Kokugakai (国画会), one of the major Japanese independent art associations and an important alternative to the official Nitten salon system. The Kokugakai was founded in 1918 by Tsuchida Bakusen and other secessionist Nihonga painters, and its annual exhibitions at the Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum function as a competitive showcase for both painting and printmaking. Membership is competitive and Kanda's affiliation confirms his status as an established working artist within the Kokugakai independent-association track.

The title 'lost image photograph 25-01' situates Kanda's work within a specific contemporary register — the silkscreen rendering of photographic source material, in which the technical capability of silkscreen for tonal-register reproduction is deployed as a conceptual tool for examining photographic memory, image loss, and the materiality of the photographic image. The 'lost image photograph' framing suggests a sustained working series engaging with absent or degraded photographic source material — a register that has been productive in international photo-based contemporary print since the 1980s and that finds particular resonance with the Japanese contemporary art tradition's sustained interest in memory, loss, and absence.

The 66 × 51 cm sheet size is a moderate-large vertical silkscreen format. The CWAJ catalog assigned 'lost image photograph 25-01' Print No. 057 in the 68th edition.

Further biographical detail beyond the CWAJ Print Show entry — Kanda's broader exhibition history, the full extent of the 'lost image photograph' working series, gallery representation, and earlier work — is not currently surfaced through the public-facing English-language channels. Kokugakai exhibition records, the Tokyo University of the Arts and Kyoto City University of Arts alumni networks, and Tokyo-area photo-based contemporary print exhibition records would be the principal next-step research targets for extending this bio.