Shu Kuroki

Shu Kuroki (黒木周, born 1965 in Miyakonojo, Miyazaki Prefecture) is a Japanese contemporary printmaker known for a distinctive planographic technique printed from cloth. Rather than the washi-and-woodblock of most Japanese printmaking, he prints from fabric-covered plates — a lithographic-family process he has termed "crossgraph" (クロスグラフ). He graduated from the Department of Painting at Tama Art University in Tokyo in 1990 and served as a printmaking assistant there in the early 1990s before, in 2002, relocating his practice to his home city of Miyakonojo — an unusual geographic choice within the Tokyo-centric contemporary print scene that reflects an established regional independent practice.

The cloth-plate medium is unusual in contemporary Japanese printmaking. Most Japanese printmakers work on washi (handmade Japanese paper) or, occasionally, on Western-tradition paper; Kuroki's choice of a fabric-covered plate as the printing surface points to an interest in texture and surface that runs through his imagery. He often begins from concrete observation — the damage and stains on a wall, foliage in a garden — and abstracts what he sees into simplified forms: clusters of dots and slightly distorted circles and squares that leave interpretation open to the viewer.

His work is frequently realized in square or near-square formats, which provide a balanced compositional ground for these texture-and-surface compositions in a way that strongly horizontal or vertical formats do not. The quiet scale and the cloth substrate together generate a contemplative, surface-attentive presence that distinguishes his work from the more graphic or chromatically diverse currents of contemporary Japanese printmaking.

Kuroki has exhibited widely in Japan and abroad. He has taken part in the CWAJ Print Show in Tokyo, the Pacific Rim International Print Exhibition in Hawaii (1994), and the Cadaqués International Mini Print exhibition in Spain (1994), and has held solo exhibitions at a range of galleries. Within the contemporary Japanese print scene Kuroki represents one of the more unconventional technical practices — an artist who has chosen an unconventional, non-paper printing surface and sustained it over a long career — whose Tama Art University training and Miyakonojo base together illustrate the geographic and technical pluralism of the contemporary Japanese print world.