Akiko Kumazaki

Akiko Kumazaki (born 1978, Aichi Prefecture) is a Japanese woodcut printmaker working in water-based ink — a hand-pulled relief technique closer to the historical Japanese mokuhanga vocabulary than to the oil-based woodcut common in Western relief printmaking. Based in Tokyo, she trained at Tama Art University, completing both her undergraduate studies and a graduate degree there, and has built a sustained practice anchored in the Tokyo print scene, circulating her work internationally through the College Women's Association of Japan (CWAJ) Print Show.

Her print 'bleu esquisse — red blue' (2024) is a vertical 100 × 62 cm woodcut printed in water-based ink, shown in the CWAJ Print Show. The title's combination of French ('bleu esquisse', a blue sketch) and English colour identifiers ('red blue') sets up an interlocking colour proposition: the print operates as a composition in red, blue, and the unprinted white of the paper, translating a watercolour-like colour sketch into the layered registration of the relief medium. At 100 × 62 cm the format is large for a hand-pulled water-based woodblock, a scale that demands well-established control of colour registration.

Kumazaki belongs to two professional bodies: the Japan Print Association (日本版画家協会), a national professional society for printmaking, and the Print Studies Association (版画学会), an academic body for printmaking research and exhibition. Membership in both — one applied, one academic — is characteristic of younger printmakers who have come through graduate-level training and who maintain both an artistic practice and a research-adjacent professional identity. Her CWAJ Print Show participation is a principal channel through which her work circulates internationally.