Hisashi Kurachi

Hisashi Kurachi (born 1961, Nagoya, Aichi Prefecture) is a Japanese printmaker whose work merges lithography, etching, and photographic image-making into a sustained reflection on what he describes as a 'dual life' — two coexisting societies, one of nature and one of civilization, presented within a single sheet. Trained at Aichi Prefectural University of Fine Arts and Music, where he completed graduate studies in oil painting in 1986, he has developed a print practice that crosses traditional intaglio and lithographic registers and that frequently incorporates photographic transfer onto paper mounted to acrylic panels.

Kurachi's early career was shaped by international print biennials. In 1999 he won a Silver Prize at the Taiwan International Print Biennial and a Triennial Prize at the Norway International Print Triennial in the same year, and undertook a six-month residency at Silpakorn University in Bangkok. He was appointed a Cultural Affairs Agency domestic research fellow in 1996. The early lithograph and etching combinations from this period — including the 1999 sheet 'dual life' '99' (63 × 84.5 cm) — set the visual vocabulary of his subsequent body of work: divided compositions in which one register reads as natural environment and the other as constructed civilization, with image-areas that read flat and graphic against generous unprinted margins.

During the 2000s Kurachi increasingly incorporated photographic imagery into the print object itself. The 2004 work 'positive' (72 × 58.4 cm) and the 2008 work 'mig' (70 × 100 cm) are photographic prints on paper mounted to acrylic, edition-numbered as discrete prints. This shift situates his practice between conventional limited-edition intaglio and lithography, on the one hand, and the broader contemporary expanded-print tradition that has been central to Japanese institutional print discourse since the 1990s.

His prize record across the late 1990s and 2000s places him among the most consistently internationally-recognized Japanese printmakers of his generation. He won the Director's Prize at the 2005 Krakow International Print Triennial in Poland, the Special Prize at the 2007 Split Graphic Biennial in Croatia, and the Special Excellence Award at the 2009 Bangkok International Print Triennial. The Krakow Triennial is one of the field's most competitive juried exhibitions, with several thousand submissions per cycle; the Director's Prize there is a marker of senior contemporary status.

Kurachi belongs to the Aichi-area print constituency that emerged in the 1990s out of Aichi Prefectural University of Fine Arts. The university's printmaking program has produced a number of internationally-circulating intaglio and lithographic artists, and Kurachi's combination of regional training with sustained international biennial recognition is characteristic of the cohort. His sustained engagement with the dual-society theme has aligned his work with the Eastern European political-print tradition rather than with the more lyrical landscape mode common to other Japanese contemporaries.