Miho Miura

Miho Miura (born 1961, Chiba Prefecture, Japan) is a senior Japanese contemporary woodcut printmaker, currently based in Chiba. She trained at Tokyo Zokei University (the principal Tokyo design-and-fine-art university founded in 1966) and supplemented her university training with summer workshops at Sokukei Art School. She studied under the printmaker Ueno Shuko, a senior contemporary Japanese printmaker associated with Tokyo-area woodcut practice.

Her 2024 woodcut 'The Lights Go On in the Town with the Rustling of Rice Seedling' (30 × 24 cm), exhibited at the 68th CWAJ Print Show 2025, was sold during the show; the Japanese title and the small-format size together signal an intimate, observational landscape register. The detailed long title — combining the auditory cue of rustling rice seedlings with the visual cue of town lights coming on — establishes a quiet narrative of dusk in a rural-suburban Japanese landscape. The 30 × 24 cm sheet size is small for contemporary Japanese woodcut but typical of artists working in tightly composed observational pieces rather than large decorative compositions.

Miura's training at Tokyo Zokei University places her among the small cohort of contemporary Japanese printmakers trained at this design-and-fine-art university rather than at the more print-specialized Tama Art University, Joshibi, or Geidai. Tokyo Zokei has a strong design-and-illustration tradition alongside its fine-art programs; printmakers trained there tend to bring a graphic-design sensibility to their woodcut practice that is distinct from the more painterly or sculptural register of Tama-trained artists.

The Sokukei Art School summer workshops are an additional independent-training credential that signals a sustained engagement with the technical refinement of woodcut. Sokukei is a Tokyo art school operating outside the formal university system that has trained many working contemporary Japanese artists across painting, sculpture, and printmaking. Her study under Ueno Shuko provides a specific mentor lineage that connects her to a particular Tokyo-area contemporary woodcut tradition.

The small-format observational mode that 'The Lights Go On in the Town with the Rustling of Rice Seedling' suggests is characteristic of senior Japanese printmakers who entered practice in the 1980s and 1990s — a generation that maintained the close-observation, season-and-rural-life register of mid-twentieth-century Japanese woodcut while moving away from explicit shin-hanga or sosaku-hanga visual conventions.

Within the contemporary Japanese print scene Miura represents the senior cohort of mid-career Tokyo-Zokei-trained Chiba-based women printmakers active in the 2020s. The CWAJ Print Show 2025 selection (Print No. 094) and the 'Sold' status confirm her continuing commercial and institutional activity. Beyond the CWAJ catalogue entry, biographical detail and exhibition history are not currently surfaced through public-facing online channels.