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 photographic imagery and hand printmaking are treated as parts of one continuous medium.

Kitano completed his M.F.A. at Kyoto Seika University in 1997, majoring in printmaking. His work reached international audiences early: it appeared in 1999 in the exhibition "Japanese Contemporary Printmaking: Grandchildren of Hokusai" at Grafikens Hus in Sweden, a touring show that surveyed the 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.

Two of his most-discussed bodies of work from this period are the "Spotted Darkness" series (1998–2004) and the follow-up "Star" series (2004–2005), in which photographic images are reworked by hand so that the printed surface holds together both what the camera records and what the artist adds back into it. Yoshiko Inoue of the Wakayama Prefectural Museum of Modern Art has been among the curators to engage with and support his work.

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 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 its central concern.

Kitano's teaching at Kyoto Seika is built around the idea that printmaking has always evolved alongside technology and that its most interesting contemporary practice happens at the seam where camera, computer, and pulled print meet. He pairs traditional Japanese print education with photographic methods and pushes students toward image-making strategies rooted in composition, imagination, and the experimental use of process.

Alongside his Kyoto Seika position, he has remained active in the wider Japanese print scene, including through the PATinKyoto print-art community, and has participated in 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 place on the Kyoto Seika faculty is one of the channels through which younger printmakers in Kyoto encounter the photographic-print idiom.