Biography
Kyoko Imazu (born 1984) is a Japanese-born, Melbourne-based printmaker, papercut artist, and book artist whose intaglio practice is one of the most concentrated in contemporary Australian printmaking. She moved to Melbourne in 2002 and completed a Bachelor of Fine Art (Printmaking) at RMIT University in 2007. Her studio practice has subsequently 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 'tiny neighbours' — the bugs, weeds, pebbles, and small mammals of everyday Australian gardens — recast through the visual register of Japanese folk tale, illustrated zoology, and gentle absurdism. Recurrent subjects include rabbits (Tia, Rachel, Roobit, Hank), feral foxes and stoats, native Australian fauna (water rat, sugar glider, crested pigeon), and historical illustration motifs that she rephrases at chamber scale (her two 2017–18 etchings 'Great Piece of Turf I and II (After Dürer)' are explicit homages). Her sheets typically combine carefully tonalled aquatint backgrounds with linear etched figures, on plate sizes from miniature (12 × 10 cm) to her largest signed compositions (78 × 53 cm).
Her print catalogue spans 2007 to the present and is documented through her own studio archive and through the inventories of her commercial galleries — Australian Galleries (Melbourne), Beaver Galleries (Canberra), West Gallery Thebarton (Adelaide), Solander Gallery (Wellington, New Zealand), Odd One Out (Hong Kong), Port Jackson Press, and AG Gallery (New York). Solo exhibitions include 'Imaginary gardens with real toads in them' (Australian Galleries, 2024), 'Hiding Spots' (Australian Galleries, 2022), 'Small big things: prints & ceramics' (Beaver Galleries, 2021), 'Mayflies and Stars' (ArtSpace at Realm, Ringwood, 2020), 'Gathering' (Australian Galleries online, 2019), 'In the neighbourhood' (West Gallery Thebarton, 2017), and earlier shows in Hong Kong, Wellington, and New York.
Residencies and awards include a 2017 Fellowship at the State Library of Victoria in conjunction with the Amor Residency at Baldessin Press Studio, the Australian Print Workshop Dowd Foundation Scholarship (2014), an Arts Victoria Arts Development Grant (2013, with collaborator Damon Kowarsky), the Japan Foundation Sydney 'Facetnate!' New Visual Artists Grant (2011), and the Firestation Print Studio Award (2008). She was a 2019 finalist in the Geelong Acquisitive Print Awards, the Megalo International Print Prize, and the Fremantle Arts Centre Print Award, and a 2023 finalist for the Banyule Award for Works on Paper.
Her prints are held in the National Gallery of Australia, the National Library of Australia, the State Library of Victoria, the State Library of Queensland, the RMIT University Art Collection, and the Melbourne Athenaeum Library. She has also produced more than two dozen artist books — many of them accordion-fold or tunnel-book formats featuring her etched and digitally-printed imagery — and a parallel body of papercut and shadow-puppet installations including House of Dreams (Johnston Collection, 2015), the ANZAC Centenary commemorative project at Werribee (2015), and a Tarrawarra Museum of Art shadow installation (2025).
Key Facts
- Active Period
- 1984
- Nationality
- 🇯🇵Japan
- Movement
- Contemporary Mokuhanga
- Works Indexed
- 20
Frequently Asked Questions
Kyoko Imazu (born 1984) is a Japanese-born, Melbourne-based printmaker, papercut artist, and book artist whose intaglio practice is one of the most concentrated in contemporary Australian printmaking. She moved to Melbourne in 2002 and completed a Bachelor of Fine Art (Printmaking) at RMIT University in 2007. Her studio practice has subsequently 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.
Kyoko Imazu was active born in 1984. They were associated with the Contemporary Mokuhanga movement.
Kyoko Imazu's work was shaped by the Contemporary Mokuhanga tradition in Japanese woodblock printmaking. Contemporary Mokuhanga: Contemporary mokuhanga (literally "wood-block print") encompasses artists working from approximately 1970 to the present who continue or reinvent traditional Japanese woodblock printing techniques.
