Saki Kitamura

Saki Kitamura (born 1989, Nagasaki) is a Japanese woodcut printmaker with a sustained practice based in Kanagawa Prefecture. Her selection in the 68th CWAJ Print Show in 2025 with 'Mt. White A,' a 60 × 43 cm woodcut from 2024, places her within the cohort of early-career to mid-career Japanese woodblock artists circulating through the principal Tokyo-area juried exhibition channels in the mid-2020s.

Kitamura received her training at Tama Art University (Tamabi) and continued through the Tama Art University graduate program. The Tama Art University printmaking program has produced a substantial line of contemporary Japanese print artists from the 1970s onward, and the program's woodcut stream in particular has been a major channel for the contemporary Japanese woodblock tradition.

Kitamura's principal teachers were Kobayashi Keisei and Furuya Hiroko, two senior figures on the Tama Art University printmaking faculty. Kobayashi Keisei (b. 1944) is one of the most internationally recognized contemporary Japanese woodblock printmakers, with major holdings in international museum collections and a sustained career as a Tama Art University professor. Furuya Hiroko is a senior teacher at Tamabi who has trained multiple Japanese printmakers across the past two decades; her teaching lineage runs through several of the early-career CWAJ-selected woodcut artists, including Kotaki Chika (CWAJ batch-04) and Kitamura herself.

The Kobayashi Keisei teaching lineage in particular places Kitamura within one of the most documented and influential teaching lines in postwar Japanese woodblock practice. The Kobayashi aesthetic — with its sustained focus on architectural and structural subjects rendered through the multi-block woodcut tradition — is consistent with the structural register of Kitamura's selected work.

The Nagasaki-born, Tamabi-trained, Kanagawa-resident pattern of Kitamura's career trajectory is consistent with the typical early-career path for contemporary Japanese printmakers — moving from regional birthplace to Tokyo for art-university training and continuing in the greater Tokyo area for professional practice. The title 'Mt. White A' (with the 'A' suggesting a working-state designation or a series initial) is a brief geographical-toponymic reference; the subject suggests a snow-capped mountain depicted in the multi-block woodcut tradition characteristic of Japanese landscape print.

The 60 × 43 cm vertical sheet size is a moderate-format woodcut, consistent with the upright presentation of mountain subjects. The CWAJ catalog assigned 'Mt. White A' Print No. 069 in the 68th edition.

Further biographical detail beyond the CWAJ Print Show entry — Kitamura's broader exhibition history, gallery representation, museum holdings, and the planned arc of the 'Mt. White' series — is not currently surfaced through the public-facing English-language channels. The Tama Art University alumni records, Kanagawa-area exhibition records, and the Kobayashi Keisei and Furuya Hiroko teaching-line documentation would be the principal next-step research targets for extending this bio.