Kimiko Kojima

Kimiko Kojima (born 1942, Okazaki City, Aichi Prefecture) is a Japanese printmaker and textile designer best known for elegant silkscreen prints of contemporary women paired with traditional Japanese motifs — koi, plum blossoms, cresting waves, peonies, hawks — printed in a restrained palette of black and warm cream that lends the figures an art-deco poise. She trained as a designer in postwar Japan and has divided her practice between gallery print editions and applied design for the Japanese fashion and home-goods industries.

Kojima's earliest recognition came when she was still young: in 1959 she received a prize at the UNESCO For Children Competition in Austria. She later settled in Tokyo and built a reputation as a printmaker who could carry a single image — a slender woman in a kimono-influenced contemporary outfit, often turned three-quarters away — across decades of variations, holding numerous one-woman exhibitions in Tokyo galleries, including in the Ginza district.

Her print imagery centers on female figures rendered in clean outline, paired with the seasonal flora and fauna of the classical Japanese painter's repertoire: peonies and camellias, cherry blossoms and plum branches, koi carp swimming under waves and the moon, hawks silhouetted on bare boughs. The compositions often play a contemporary woman against an emblem from Edo painting, splitting the picture plane between the figure and a stylized natural element. The dominant black-on-cream palette gives the prints a graphic immediacy that translates well to applied media; she has carried the same repertoire of figures into licensed designs for handbags, umbrellas, handkerchiefs, and lingerie.

Recurring titles in dealer inventory include Koito Botan (Lady with Koi Fish), Bird and Woman, Frolicking, Hawk, Koi and Cherry, Moon, Moon and Koi, Plum Tree, Water in Spring, Wave and Camellia, and Wave and Pine — all rooted in the same visual program. Her one-woman shows extended beyond Tokyo to Nagoya, and she has exhibited internationally in Canada and the United States. The Gilbert Luber Gallery notes that she was recognized as a promising artist during the 1980s.

Later in her career Kojima broadened her practice to include oil painting and continued textile design alongside print editions, though her gallery presence remains anchored in the silkscreen editions she has produced over many years. Her work circulates in the United States through specialist dealers including the Luber Gallery and Hanga Ten.

Kojima's significance in contemporary Japanese print history rests on the consistency of her vocabulary across an unusually long career and on the way she translated the elegance of art-deco line into a printmaking idiom legible both to fine-art collectors and to the consumer-design market. She is one of a handful of postwar Japanese printmakers whose imagery has migrated successfully into applied design without losing its identity as gallery editioned work.