Biography
Saki Kitamura (北村早紀, born 1989 in Nagasaki) is a Japanese woodblock printmaker. She graduated from the printmaking major of the Painting Department at Tama Art University (Tamabi) in 2013 and completed a master's degree in printmaking at the university's graduate school in 2015.
Working primarily in the mokuhanga (woodblock) tradition, Kitamura takes the human figure as her principal motif. She treats the areas a printmaker leaves uncarved — the passages that surface only through the act of printing — as a means of "printing off" surface, blank space, and absence, and she favours the reductive carve-and-print (hori-susume) method, in which the intermediate states that would otherwise be lost can be preserved. Her student work "Give me My name #1" was recognized at the 37th National University Print Exhibition.
Kitamura's prints circulate through Japan's principal juried-exhibition channels for contemporary work. She was among the artists selected for the 68th CWAJ Print Show, held in Tokyo in 2025, with the woodblock print "Mt. White A," and in 2025 her mountain-themed prints were shown together with those of Ayako Ishiba in a two-person exhibition in Tokyo. Based in the greater Tokyo area, she continues to work across woodblock printmaking, painting, and drawing. Detailed English-language documentation of her broader career remains limited.
Key Facts
- Active Period
- 1989
- Nationality
- 🇯🇵Japan
- Movement
- Contemporary Mokuhanga
- Subjects
- Landscapes
- Works Indexed
- 1
Frequently Asked Questions
Saki Kitamura (北村早紀, born 1989 in Nagasaki) is a Japanese woodblock printmaker. She graduated from the printmaking major of the Painting Department at Tama Art University (Tamabi) in 2013 and completed a master's degree in printmaking at the university's graduate school in 2015.
Saki Kitamura was active born in 1989. They were associated with the Contemporary Mokuhanga movement.
Saki Kitamura'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.
Saki Kitamura's prints frequently feature landscapes.