Hiroki Makino

Hiroki Makino (born 1975, Nagano Prefecture, Japan) is a Japanese contemporary woodcut printmaker who completed his training at Tama Art University in Tokyo and is now a long-term member of multiple Japanese print associations: the Japan Print Association (Nihon Hanga Kyokai), the Japan Art Association, the Japan Design Association, and the Print Society. He is currently based in Tokyo.

His 2025 woodcut 'Floral Clouds in a Crimson Sky' (97 × 67 cm), exhibited at the 68th CWAJ Print Show 2025, demonstrates the visual register he has consolidated in his mid-career practice: a vertical large-format woodcut presenting a floral motif rendered as cloud-form against a crimson ground. The 97 cm vertical dimension places his work at the upper end of comfortable single-block woodcut work; the choice of vertical orientation and the floral-cloud subject sits within a contemplative-decorative tradition that connects contemporary Japanese woodcut to senior practitioners like Yoshikawa Fusako (b. 1941) and to historical decorative woodblock traditions.

Makino's training at Tama Art University connects him to the same Tama-printmaking-faculty cohort as Ikuhiro Kugo (b. 1977), Akiko Kumazaki (b. 1978), Yoshinori Kurimoto (b. 1960), and others who have come through the Tama Art University printmaking program at varying intervals. The faculty has been a primary transmission channel for traditional Japanese woodcut technique combined with contemporary decorative-and-figurative subject matter.

The quadruple-association membership — Japan Print Association, Japan Art Association, Japan Design Association, Print Society — is unusually broad and signals an active engagement across the institutional channels of Japanese printmaking and visual design. The Japan Design Association membership in particular suggests a working interest in design-adjacent commercial print activity alongside fine-art printmaking, a combination that is increasingly common among contemporary Tokyo-based mid-career printmakers who balance studio practice with editorial-and-design work.

The visual register of 'Floral Clouds in a Crimson Sky' — flowers presented as cloud-forms against a strongly chromatic ground — combines the decorative-floral subject matter of historical Japanese textile and screen-painting traditions with the contemporary chromatic boldness that distinguishes recent mid-career Tokyo printmakers. The technique is traditional Japanese mokuhanga (water-based ink, hand-rubbed registration) rather than the imported European woodcut traditions that other contemporary Japanese printmakers have adopted.

Within the contemporary Japanese woodcut scene Makino represents the cohort of mid-career Tokyo-based printmakers in their late forties active across multiple Japanese association channels. Beyond the CWAJ catalogue entry and the association-membership listings, biographical detail and a fuller exhibition history are not currently surfaced through public-facing online channels.