Hiroyuki Kitano

Hiroyuki Kitano (born 1972, Kyoto) is a Japanese photographer and printmaker who teaches in the Printmaking Course at Kyoto Seika University, where his pedagogical and artistic work focuses on the convergence of photographic image-making and traditional print processes. His own studio practice has consistently used the printed surface to test what photography records and what hand intervention can add to it — a body of work in which monotype, gelatin silver print, and digital composite are treated as inseparable parts of one continuous medium.

Kitano completed his M.F.A. at Kyoto Seika University in 1997, majoring in printmaking. He was almost immediately picked up for international exposure: his work appeared in 1999 in the exhibition "Japanese Contemporary Printmaking: Grand Children of Hokusai" at Grafikens Hus in Sweden, a touring show that surveyed the next generation of Japanese printmakers after the postwar masters. He continued to exhibit through the early 2000s with solo shows including "Image / Photograph / Media" at Gallery Ikeda Bijutsu in Tokyo (2000) and "Spotted Darkness" at Don Soker Contemporary Art in San Francisco (2001). He showed at the Vienna Art Center in Austria in 2002 and held an artist residency at the Rhode Island School of Design in 2003.

The "Spotted Darkness" series (1998-2004), one of his most-discussed bodies of work, is a sequence of monotypes in which static "snow" from television screens is transferred to paper and then articulated by hand-drawn intervention. The visual hum of analog noise becomes a printed field, and Kitano works back into the surface to recover legibility — a strategy that Yoshiko Inoue, then curator at the Wakayama Museum of Modern Art, described as exposing the relationship between what photography captures and what one perceives. The follow-up "Star" series (2004-2005) used gelatin silver prints with added dots to enhance luminosity, a literal hand-amplification of the photographic source.

In 2015 Kitano spent time as a visiting artist at the Utrecht School of the Arts in the Netherlands, where he developed the "Light Room" project — a solo exhibition built from digitally composited photographs of bathroom tiles layered over folded paper objects he called "Light Models." The work pushed his photographic-print practice further toward the sculptural and installational, while keeping the image as the central concern. Light Room photographs continue to circulate in the PATinKyoto exhibition archives.

Kitano's teaching at Kyoto Seika is built around the idea that printmaking has always evolved with technology and that its best contemporary practice happens at the seam where camera, computer, and pulled print meet. He pairs traditional Japanese print education with photographic methodologies and pushes students toward image-making strategies that cannot be replicated outside the printmaking classroom — composition, imagination, and the experimental use of process.

Alongside his Kyoto Seika position, he has remained active in the larger Japanese print scene as a contributor to the PATinKyoto Print Art Triennale and as a participant in regional and international exhibitions in Sweden, Austria, the United States, and the Netherlands. His career sits at the photography-printmaking boundary that has produced some of the most interesting contemporary Japanese print work since the 1990s, and his presence on the Kyoto Seika faculty is one of the channels through which younger printmakers in Kyoto are exposed to the photographic-print idiom.