Kimiko Kojima

Kimiko Kojima (born 1942, Okazaki City, Aichi Prefecture) is a Japanese printmaker and textile designer best known for elegant lithographs and serigraphs 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 spent much of her professional life dividing 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 a child: she received an award at the UNESCO For Children Competition in Austria in 1959, while a student in her hometown. After her formal training she settled in Tokyo and began exhibiting prints in solo shows in the 1970s, with annual one-woman exhibitions in the Ginza district that ran from 1970 through 2002. The shows established her recognizable visual signature and her 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.

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 sold through major Japanese department-store chains.

Her auction-recorded works include Koito Botan (Lady with Koi Fish, 1978), a piece that has set her highest secondary-market price in recent years. Other recurring titles in dealer inventory include 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. Within Japan her one-woman gallery shows extended beyond Tokyo to Nagoya, and she has exhibited internationally in Canada and the United States. She is described by the Luber Gallery as a printmaker who 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 lithograph and serigraph editions she has produced for over five decades. Her work circulates in the U.S. through specialist dealers including the Luber Gallery and Hanga Ten, and through the secondary market via auction houses tracked by MutualArt.