Biography
Aiu Kitayama Yamazaki (北山山崎アイウ) is a Japanese-born printmaker and researcher whose contemporary mokuhanga practice has developed inside the institutional framework of the University of the Arts London, and whose published work crosses between art-historical research on the early sōsaku-hanga movement and the studio production of woodblock prints. She completed the Master of Arts in Fine Art Printmaking at Camberwell College of Arts, University of the Arts London (2019–2020), and was awarded Printmaking Today journal's State of the Art Prize in 2020. Her exhibition record from the London years includes the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition, the Royal Scottish Academy Annual Exhibition, and the Woolwich Contemporary Print Show. Her print Stairs of the Auditorium — a 45 by 30 centimetre woodblock print — was selected for the 2024 International Mokuhanga Conference juried exhibition in Echizen.
Her ongoing series Auditorium gives that work its conceptual frame: it stages a sustained meditation on reflected light from a stage, drawing on her reading of Maurice Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology of perception and on the traditional Japanese aesthetic that values dim light in darkness. Her parallel research practice has focused on the aesthetic exchange between Japan and the West from the late nineteenth century onward, particularly the Bauhaus and the St Ives artists in their relation to Japanese modernism; her published work includes the essay 'In Praise of Shadows' by Jun'ichiro Tanizaki: A Reflection on Two Contemporary Artists, Hiroshi Sugimoto and Rebecca Salter, with Relation to Aiu Kitayama Yamazaki's Contemporary Print Practice in the IMPACT Printmaking Journal (Issue Four, Autumn 2021) and, with co-authors, Influence of 'The Studio' on Kanae Yamamoto: Founder of Sōsaku Hanga Movement — Creative Printmaking. The two strands are tightly linked: her studio production foregrounds the perceptual structure that her writing places at the centre of early sōsaku-hanga's encounter with European modernism.
She maintains an artist website under the handle aiukitayama. A definitive birth year and a biographical chronology outside the Camberwell period have not been recovered in the sources available here; she is best characterized at present as an emerging printmaker-researcher whose practice has been consolidated through the London printmaking system and validated through the IMC selection in 2024.
Key Facts
- Nationality
- 🇯🇵Japan
- Movement
- Contemporary Mokuhanga
- Works Indexed
- 1
Frequently Asked Questions
Aiu Kitayama Yamazaki (北山山崎アイウ) is a Japanese-born printmaker and researcher whose contemporary mokuhanga practice has developed inside the institutional framework of the University of the Arts London, and whose published work crosses between art-historical research on the early sōsaku-hanga movement and the studio production of woodblock prints. She completed the Master of Arts in Fine Art Printmaking at Camberwell College of Arts, University of the Arts London (2019–2020), and was awarded Printmaking Today journal's State of the Art Prize in 2020. Her exhibition record from the London years includes the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition, the Royal Scottish Academy Annual Exhibition, and the Woolwich Contemporary Print Show. Her print Stairs of the Auditorium — a 45 by 30 centimetre woodblock print — was selected for the 2024 International Mokuhanga Conference juried exhibition in Echizen.
Kitayama Yamazaki Aiu'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.