Biography
Yukie Kishi (岸雪絵) is a Japanese printmaker and educator who serves as Associate Professor in the Graduate School (Arts Studies) at Kyoto University of the Arts. Her practice is centred on lithography and drawing, and she is one of the active mid-career figures in the Kyoto print scene, having emerged from the city's academic printmaking lineage.
Kishi completed a BA at Kyoto Seika University and an MA at the Kyoto City University of Arts Graduate School in 2005, working in painting and printmaking, before joining the Kyoto University of the Arts faculty, where she teaches printmaking alongside her own studio output. This Kyoto-based academic training places her within the 2000s generation of Kyoto printmakers.
Her studio practice articulates a distinctive conceptual register: she explores the “assumptions and illusions” encountered when observing objects and the idea of “reality amidst uncertainty,” making prints and drawings based on photographic imagery of familiar subjects such as glass cups and other domestic still-life objects. Her recent lithographs — small-format plates depicting transparent and reflective everyday objects in still-life arrangements — typify this vocabulary.
Her award history extends across two decades. She received Kyoto Exhibition awards at the Kyoto Municipal Museum of Art in 2005 and 2007, the Band Name Stone Award at the Aomori International Print Triennale in 2007, the Kyoto Municipal Museum of Art Award in 2009, the Miida Seiichiro Award at the 1st TKO International Mini Print Exhibition in 2016, and an Honorable Mention at the 9th Adachi Ukiyo-e Grand Prize in 2018. She has exhibited at Tokyo Wonder Wall (Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo, 2011), the Edition of Time / Age of Prints exhibition at Joshibi Art University Art Museum (2012), the Kyoto Prefecture Art and Crafts New Selection Exhibition (2019), and FACE 2019 at the SOMPO Museum (2019).
Her prints are held in public collections including the National Diet Library, the Kyoto Municipal Museum of Art, the Hyogo Prefectural Museum of Art, the Machida City Museum of Graphic Arts, and the Bank of Kyoto. She is a member of the Japan Society of Printmaking and has exhibited in the annual Print Show of the College Women's Association of Japan (CWAJ), through which her work reaches audiences in the United States and internationally.
Within the contemporary Japanese print scene, Kishi is representative of the Kyoto academic mid-career generation: a faculty printmaker whose lithographic still-life practice combines disciplined, photographically derived figuration with a conceptual interest in perception and the relationship between an observed object and its printed surface. Her sustained record at Japanese national prize exhibitions and at international festivals places her among printmakers whose work circulates simultaneously at domestic-museum, international-biennial, and academic-pedagogical scales.
Key Facts
- Nationality
- 🇯🇵Japan
- Movement
- Contemporary Mokuhanga
- Subjects
- Still Life
- Works Indexed
- 1
Frequently Asked Questions
Yukie Kishi (岸雪絵) is a Japanese printmaker and educator who serves as Associate Professor in the Graduate School (Arts Studies) at Kyoto University of the Arts. Her practice is centred on lithography and drawing, and she is one of the active mid-career figures in the Kyoto print scene, having emerged from the city's academic printmaking lineage.
Yukie Kishi'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.
Yukie Kishi's prints frequently feature still life.