Takumi Kimoto

Takumi Kimoto (born 2003, Ibaraki Prefecture) is an emerging Japanese lithographer with a sustained practice currently based in Tokyo. His selection in the 68th CWAJ Print Show in 2025 — at age 22 — with 'Dancing Festival' (踊る祭), a substantial 92 × 78 cm lithograph from 2024, places him among the very youngest selected artists in the catalog and confirms early professional engagement with the medium that began during his undergraduate training.

Kimoto received his training at Musashino Art University, one of the principal private Japanese art universities and a major training ground for Japanese contemporary printmakers since its postwar expansion. The Musashino Art University printmaking program is well established across multiple media, and the lithography stream in particular has produced a distinguished line of contemporary practitioners.

The Ibaraki-born, Musashino-trained, Tokyo-resident pattern of Kimoto's career — at age 22 — is characteristic of the suburban-Kanto-to-Tokyo movement of contemporary Japanese art students. The Greater Tokyo Area is the principal home of contemporary Japanese print activity, and Musashino Art University is one of the principal entry points to professional Japanese print practice.

The substantial 92 × 78 cm sheet size of 'Dancing Festival' is at the upper end of lithographic practice — a near-metre-tall composition requires substantial press capacity and workshop time, and producing work at this scale at age 21-22 (the 2024 print date implies plate-work begun during the artist's early undergraduate or pre-graduate period) signals both technical command and ambitious compositional intent.

The title 'Dancing Festival' (踊る祭, odoru matsuri) places the work within the long Japanese tradition of festival imagery — a subject category running from the Edo-period documentation of Tokyo's seasonal festivals through the contemporary print celebration of regional matsuri practice. Festival subjects in Japanese contemporary print typically focus on the dynamic compositions of dancers, the patterning of costumed crowds, and the structural-geometric compositions of festival floats — subjects well suited to the lithographic technique's capacity for both linear definition and tonal modeling.

The CWAJ catalog assigned 'Dancing Festival' Print No. 066 in the 68th edition.

Further biographical detail beyond the CWAJ Print Show entry — Kimoto's broader exhibition history, gallery representation, undergraduate thesis work (still in progress at the time of the 2025 catalog), and continuing series direction — is not currently surfaced through the public-facing English-language channels. The Musashino Art University student records and Tokyo-area emerging-artist exhibition databases would be the principal next-step research targets for extending this bio. As one of the youngest CWAJ-selected artists in the 68th edition (age 22 at the time of selection), Kimoto's documented practice is at an unusually early career stage; subsequent CWAJ Print Show editions are likely to continue including his work as he advances through the Musashino Art University graduate program and beyond.