Yoshinori Kurimoto

Yoshinori Kurimoto (born 1960, Osaka, Japan) is a senior Japanese contemporary woodcut printmaker who completed graduate studies at Tama Art University and trained under the printmakers Rei Yuki and Fumiaki Fukita. He is currently based in Kanagawa Prefecture and is a member of both the Japan Print Association (Nihon Hanga Kyokai) and the Japan Artists Federation, the principal national associations for working Japanese printmakers and visual artists.

His recent practice, as documented in the 68th CWAJ Print Show 2025, presents woodcut compositions in the medium-large format range — exemplified by 'I Wonder if It's Spring' (2025, 55 × 73 cm). The horizontal landscape orientation and the contemplative title together signal a contemporary Japanese woodcut practice grounded in the seasonal-and-landscape tradition that has continuously informed Japanese printmaking from sosaku-hanga through to the present. The 73 cm horizontal dimension is at the comfortable upper end of single-block woodcut work.

His training under Rei Yuki and Fumiaki Fukita places him in a Tokyo printmaking lineage that runs through the Tama Art University Graduate School. Both Yuki and Fukita are contemporary Japanese printmakers associated with the Tama Art University printmaking faculty; their dual mentorship of Kurimoto is unusual within the typical single-mentor pattern and suggests a sustained engagement with the Tama Art University printmaking program across his graduate years.

Kurimoto's dual association membership — Japan Print Association and Japan Artists Federation — is a credential pattern typical of senior Tokyo-area printmakers active across multiple decades. The Japan Print Association is the medium-specific printmaker association founded in 1931, while the Japan Artists Federation (Nihon Bijutsuka Renmei) is the broader cross-medium artists' organization. Membership in both signals an established mid- and senior-career practice within the Japanese institutional system.

The visual register of his recent prints, as suggested by 'I Wonder if It's Spring,' is contemplative-seasonal: a meditation on the still-arriving early-spring landscape, rendered through traditional Japanese woodcut technique with modulated colour. Kurimoto's choice to remain within the seasonal-landscape register rather than to move toward the more graphic or abstract modes that have dominated younger CWAJ printmakers signals a deliberate continuation of senior contemporary Japanese woodcut tradition.

Within the contemporary Japanese print scene Kurimoto represents the senior cohort of Tama Art University-trained Tokyo-area woodcut printmakers active across the 1990s, 2000s, 2010s, and 2020s. Beyond the CWAJ catalogue and Japan Print Association membership records, biographical detail and full exhibition history are not currently surfaced through public-facing online channels.