Kohei Kyomori

Kohei Kyomori (born 1985, Ehime Prefecture) is a Japanese contemporary artist whose practice spans painting, decorative-art reinterpretation, and traditional Japanese woodblock printing. His central preoccupation is the asymmetrical relationship between the depopulating regions of rural Japan, where industry and population are collapsing, and the over-saturated visual culture of contemporary urban centres — a tension he explores through densely ornamented compositions that draw on decorative motifs from across cultures and historical periods.

Kyomori grew up in a dairy-farming family in a depopulated district of Ehime Prefecture on the island of Shikoku, an experience he has cited as the foundation of his interest in the relationship between identity and visuality, and between disappearing local economies and the visual abundance of metropolitan Japan. His mature work treats the act of decoration as the central artistic gesture: he describes himself as a decorative artist reinterpreting decorative arts from different decades and from cultures around the world, and he views ornament as a vehicle for symbolic meaning, transcribed onto two-dimensional surfaces in vibrant painted form.

His paintings combine mineral pigments and UV resin on canvas — a technical hybrid that allows him to layer dense ornamental fields with a hard, almost glass-like protective top coat. Recent series include Self Decoration (2026), O bloom and O Float (2022), and the M Jyuzo F (2025) mixed-media works exhibited at Whitestone Gallery, Ginza. The compositions use flat picture-plane construction strongly inflected by ukiyo-e — a deliberate citation of Edo-period printmaking surfaces — and they reach for ornament from textile, ceramic, and architectural sources alongside the Japanese tradition.

In 2022 Kyomori entered into a major collaboration with Unsōdō, the Kyoto-based woodblock print publishing house established in 1891 and one of the historically most important publishers of late Meiji and Taishō shin-hanga. Working with master engraver Shoichi Kitamura (a craftsman with more than thirty years of experience) and printer Kyoko Hirai, Kyomori's digital paintings were translated into traditional woodblock prints — a project that placed his contemporary ornament-driven compositions inside the same hand-cut, baren-printed production system that produced the great prints of Hasui Kawase and Yoshida Hiroshi. The collaboration was launched at his Whitestone Gallery solo exhibition Impression -O- in Taipei (2022), which featured the woodblock works alongside his canvas paintings.

His awards have been substantial. He won the Hermès International Scarf Design Competition Grand Prix in 2020, the FEI Print Award Grand Prix in 2018, the Art Startup 100 Reward Prize in 2019, and second prize at both the Spiral Independent Creators Festival 20 (2019) and the IAG Awards 2019. The Hermès award is particularly notable: it is one of the most-watched textile-design competitions in the luxury sector, and Kyomori's grand-prix-winning design has continued to circulate through Hermès silk-scarf production.