Chika Kotaki

Chika Kotaki (born 1998, Chiba Prefecture) is a Japanese woodcut printmaker who emerged in the late 2010s and early 2020s as one of the youngest printmakers consistently selected for the College Women's Association of Japan (CWAJ) Print Show. Tokyo-based, she is part of the most recent generation of Japanese printmakers, having completed her studies at Tama Art University, where she trained under the senior printmaker Furuya Hiroko (古谷博子).

Kotaki's training at Tama Art University places her at the heart of the Kanto-region print education system. The Tama Art University Hanga Course is one of the largest and most active university printmaking programs in Japan, and its graduates have anchored the contemporary Japanese print scene since the late 1990s. Her teacher Furuya Hiroko is a sustained Tama-area woodcut artist whose practice combines technical depth with a specific interest in the print's relationship to the body and to time.

Her 2024 print 'Stream' — selected for the 68th CWAJ Print Show in 2025 — is a 70 × 77 cm woodcut, nearly square, whose composition reads as a fluid, all-over patterning that gives the title its specific reference. The horizontal-square format and the all-over rhythm of cut marks across the sheet are characteristic of younger Japanese woodcut artists who are less interested in scenic representation than in the print as a meditative pattern-field, the cut-mark itself becoming the principal visual subject.

Within the contemporary Japanese print field, Kotaki belongs to the youngest generation of printmakers — those who turn 27 or 28 in 2026 — whose practice has been shaped from the start by digital tools and by familiarity with the global mokuhanga community alongside the conventional Japanese print education system. The CWAJ Print Show selection at age 26 is an early credential, and her sustained Tokyo-based studio practice through the early 2020s suggests that she is on the standard trajectory of younger printmakers who develop a sustained body of work in their first decade of professional practice.

The slug `kotaki-chika-cwaj` distinguishes this CWAJ-affiliated younger printmaker from the senior Kyoto-area mokuhanga printmaker Kotaki Chika who appeared in earlier rosters; the kanji here is 香焼 (Kōyaki / Kotaki) rather than 小滝, and the artist is the younger emerging printmaker whose career is anchored at Tama Art University and CWAJ.