Kyoko Imazu

Kyoko Imazu (born 1984) is a Japanese-born, Melbourne-based printmaker, papercut artist, and book artist whose intaglio practice is among the most concentrated in contemporary Australian printmaking. She has lived in Australia since 2002 and completed a Bachelor of Fine Art (Printmaking) at RMIT University in Melbourne in 2007. Her studio practice has since grown across etching and aquatint, drypoint, lithography, wood engraving, and papercut, supported by long-running residency relationships with Baldessin Press & Studio and the Australian Print Workshop.

Imazu's iconography is structured around what she calls her 'tiny neighbours' — the bugs, weeds, pebbles, and small creatures of everyday Australian gardens — recast through the visual register of Japanese folk tale, illustrated zoology, and gentle absurdism. Recurring subjects include rabbits, feral foxes and stoats, and native Australian fauna, often characters drawn from her childhood in Japan and set within Australian or otherwise ambivalent landscapes. Her sheets typically combine carefully tonalled aquatint backgrounds with linear etched figures, at scales ranging from the miniature to her largest signed compositions.

Over the past decade she has been included in more than a hundred exhibitions across the Asia-Pacific region and the United States, and she is represented by a number of galleries including Australian Galleries (Melbourne), Beaver Galleries (Canberra), West Gallery Thebarton (Adelaide), Solander Gallery (Wellington), Odd One Out (Hong Kong), and AG Gallery (New York). Solo exhibitions include 'Hiding Spots' (Australian Galleries, 2022) and 'Small big things: prints & ceramics' (Beaver Galleries, 2021), alongside earlier shows in Adelaide, Hong Kong, Wellington, and New York.

In 2017 she was awarded a Fellowship by the State Library of Victoria to undertake a residency at Baldessin Press & Studio. Her earlier recognition includes the Australian Print Workshop Dowd Foundation Scholarship (2014), the Japan Foundation Sydney 'Facetnate!' New Visual Artists Grant (2011), and the Firestation Print Studio Award (2008). In 2019 she was a finalist in the Geelong Acquisitive Print Awards, the Megalo International Print Prize, and the Fremantle Arts Centre Print Award.

Her prints are held in the National Gallery of Australia, the National Library of Australia, the State Library of Victoria, and the State Library of Queensland. Alongside her editioned prints she produces artist books and a parallel body of papercut and shadow-puppet installations, including large-scale collaborations with Barking Spider Visual Theatre — among them an installation at The Johnston Collection (Fairhall House Museum), Melbourne, and a commemorative ANZAC Centenary project for the City of Wyndham and Werribee RSL.

Imazu sits within a small Australian printmaking community that maintains genuine intaglio depth. Her closest continuing collaboration is with the printmaker Damon Kowarsky, whom she met at the Australian Print Workshop in 2008 and with whom she has produced collaborative etchings since 2010, and she is part of the broader Baldessin Press alumni community. Her commitment to small-format, narrative-figural etching and aquatint with Japanese folkloric overtones makes her one of the most distinctive contemporary voices in Australian intaglio.