Yasunori Kinukawa

Yasunori Kinukawa (born 1978, Kyoto Prefecture) is a Japanese artist whose practice combines lithography and video work, with the distinguishing feature that his lithographic plates are not standard limestone slabs but small pieces of natural Japanese limestone that he himself collects, cuts, and grains. He completed his MFA at Kyoto Seika University in 2004 and has served as a part-time lecturer there since 2009.

The ongoing series central to his practice — initiated in 2018 and titled 'my little stone' (or referred to in English as 'Pebble Lithograph') — inverts the conventional relationship between the lithographic plate and the printed image. Rather than drawing landscapes on a generic stone surface, Kinukawa identifies a specific limestone source site, collects a small fragment of that stone, hand-grains the surface into a usable lithographic plate, and then prints onto paper a depiction of the very landscape from which the stone was extracted, along with the flora and fauna he encountered there. The stone, in his framing, carries an implied perspective of the place it came from; his observations as collector layer a second perspective onto the same surface.

The practice is distinguished from the dominant strands of contemporary Japanese mokuhanga by its focus on a Western intaglio-derived planographic technique (lithography) rather than relief woodblock, and by its insistence that the printing matrix be a found stone rather than a manufactured plate. In Kinukawa's framing, the lithographic plate ceases to be a neutral substrate and becomes a documentary specimen, partially carrying its place of origin into the printed image.

Kinukawa works alongside the art project team 'Lighter but Heavier,' through which he researches and exhibits lithography. His exhibition history includes the solo show 'Pebble Lithograph' at MATSUO MEGUMI + VOICE GALLERY pfs/w, Kyoto (2022); selection for the Second International Biennial of Lithography, Stari grad / Belgrade, Serbia (2021); the Kyoto Seika University Gallery Terra-S exhibition 'Seika Artist File #1: Flickering Creatures' (2021); and 'KOMPAS' at Zebra Culture, Ghent, Belgium (2023). He participated in 'Hand Specimen: Small Stones, Big Landscapes, and the Horizon Line' at heptagonworks (2020) in collaboration with mineral collector Nishida Katsuichi.

In 2024, Kinukawa was selected for Echigo-Tsumari Art Field 2025 with the work 'Mineralized Landscape' (石化する風景), an outdoor installation displayed weekends and holidays from July through August 2025. The Echigo-Tsumari Art Field is one of Japan's principal site-specific contemporary art triennials, anchored in Niigata's Tokamachi region.

Kinukawa's work has been documented through the Japan Foundation's ART360 contemporary art platform, where his artist profile presents the 'my little stone' series as part of the contemporary lithography movement in Japan. His ongoing collaboration with mineral collectors and his hybrid lithography-and-video practice place him within the expanded-printmaking tendency in early-twenty-first-century Japanese art, which extends print logic — repetition, plate-and-paper relationship, indexicality — into adjacent media including documentary video, found-object sculpture, and site-specific installation.