Taichi Kodama

Taichi Kodama (born 1978, Kyoto, Japan) is a Japanese printmaker working primarily in silkscreen, currently based in Okayama after dual training at the two principal Kyoto art universities. He completed undergraduate study at Kyoto Seika University and graduate study at Kyoto City University of Arts (Geidai), the two institutions that have produced a substantial proportion of the working contemporary Kyoto-area printmakers active in the CWAJ Print Show circuit and Kyoto-based commercial galleries.

His mature practice, as documented through the 68th CWAJ Print Show 2025, centres on silkscreen compositions rendered as large-format square or near-square sheets — exemplified by 'Scenery over there_22_05' (2022, 70 × 100 cm). The 'Scenery over there' series suggests a sustained ongoing project: the title format with a year-and-print-number suffix (22_05 indicating year 2022, print number 5) is a typical project-tracking convention used by Japanese printmakers who maintain numbered series across multiple years.

Kodama's choice of silkscreen as his principal medium places him within the technical lineage of contemporary Japanese print activity that emerged from the 1980s and 1990s — a generation that took up screenprinting alongside woodcut, lithograph, and intaglio as a fully legitimate print medium. The Kyoto art-university training tradition has been particularly important for screen-printers, with the Kyoto Seika University printmaking faculty (which trained Kodama at undergraduate level) producing successive cohorts of working screenprinters.

The move from Kyoto (his birth city and where he completed his graduate training) to Okayama for his current practice is a less common geographic trajectory among CWAJ-circulating printmakers, who tend to remain in Tokyo or Kyoto or to relocate abroad. Okayama is a regional city west of Kobe with a smaller but established print and craft community; the relocation suggests an independent studio practice outside the dense central-city gallery system.

The single CWAJ-catalogued print 'Scenery over there_22_05' shows the artistic register: the title format suggests a contemplation of distant landscape ('scenery over there'), and the silkscreen technique allows for the layered colour-field treatment that distinguishes contemporary silkscreen from photographic poster silkscreen. Beyond the CWAJ catalogue entry, biographical detail and exhibition history for Kodama is not currently surfaced through public-facing channels.

Kodama is one of a cohort of mid-career Kyoto-trained Japanese silkscreen printmakers active in the contemporary CWAJ circuit; his practice contributes to the maintenance of silkscreen as a serious print medium within Japanese contemporary printmaking, alongside intaglio, woodcut, and lithography.