Mayumi Koide

Mayumi Koide (小出 真由美, born 1947 in Fukuoka Prefecture) is a contemporary Japanese printmaker who works primarily in etching. She learned the fundamentals of copperplate printmaking at the Yokohama Museum of Art and has built a sustained exhibiting practice within Japan's principal printmaking institutions. She is a member of the Japan Print Association (Nihon Hanga Kyōkai), the country's leading national printmaking body, and serves as a director of the New Art Association.

Koide treats the etched copper plate as a means of catching something otherwise unseen. In her own account of her practice, she works to 'trap' the latent narratives she senses around her into the metal of the plate, using acid to corrode and mark the copper and printing to fix a trace of passing time. She has spoken of being drawn to the paradox of intaglio printing — the way the printed impression reverses the plate, as if opening onto a mirror-world — and of wishing to work as a kind of storyteller moving through that reflected space.

Working at the moderate scale characteristic of Japanese intaglio practice, Koide has been recognized in a series of juried print exhibitions over the past two decades. She won the Grand Prize at the 4th Nishi-Aizu International Art Village open-call exhibition in 2009 and a Silver Prize at the Japan Bookplate Association exhibition in 2013. Her prints have been selected for the Kochi International Print Triennial (2014 and 2020), the Aomori Triennial (2017), and the 63rd CWAJ Contemporary Print Exhibition (2019), and she has twice been honored at the Seminario Contemporary Print Exhibition — the Nanshima Mayor's Prize at its 18th edition in 2018 and the Grand Prize at its 21st in 2023.

Now in her late seventies, Koide belongs to the senior generation of Japanese etchers who have sustained copperplate work as an independent print tradition alongside woodcut and lithography, and she continues to produce new prints. Detailed biographical information about her remains scarce in English-language sources, and her standing rests chiefly on this record of exhibition and her membership in Japan's principal print associations.