Yuu Miyauchi

Yuu Miyauchi (born 1996, Chiba Prefecture) is a Japanese printmaker whose silkscreen practice investigates the relationship between gestural mark-making and the printmaking process — using brushwork as the source of imagery that is then translated into screen-printed editions. She earned a B.F.A. in 2021 and an M.F.A. in 2023 from Tama Art University's Painting Department (Printmaking specialization), and as of 2024 holds the position of Research Assistant (副手) on the Graphic Arts Course at Tama Art University.

Miyauchi's central technical question is what happens when a painter's brush mark — the gestural, visibly hand-made unit of painting — is converted into a printmaking matrix and reproduced as a printed edition. Her best-known recent works are large-format silkscreen prints (up to 1303 × 1620 mm) on canvas in which dynamic brushwork-like compositions, on closer inspection, reveal themselves to be constructed from overlapping brush-mark symbols that were photographically captured, screened, and printed onto canvas — not painted. The resulting works occupy the conceptual ground between painting and print, a theme her recommender at PATinKyoto identifies as her central inquiry: what is the value of making art itself?

Her competition record is concentrated in the early 2020s. She received the Excellence Award at the 44th National University Printmaking Exhibition at the Machida International Print Museum in 2019 (still as an undergraduate), and the Special Jury Award (selected by Tetsuya Oshima) at FACE 2023, the prestigious Sompo Japan Nipponkoa Art Award open-call exhibition at the SOMPO Museum of Art (Tokyo). She was also included in the Fifty Years of Printmaking at Tama Art University retrospective exhibition, marking the institutional recognition of her position within the Tama lineage. The 4th PATinKyoto Kyoto Print Art Triennale 2025 selected her work for inclusion at the Kyocera Museum of Art.

Miyauchi's exhibition record places her primarily in the Tokyo metropolitan-area print circuit. Her work has been featured at Art Gallery Closet (Aoyama / Roppongi area), where she shows alongside other emerging Tama-trained printmakers. The works documented on her Tama Art University faculty profile — five silkscreen pieces produced 2022–2024, in formats ranging from 530 × 455 mm up to 1303 × 1620 mm — demonstrate the consistency of her brushwork-based silkscreen vocabulary across a range of scales.

Her canvas-substrate silkscreen work is distinctive: most contemporary Japanese silkscreen artists print on paper, while Miyauchi's commitment to silkscreen on canvas treats the print as a continuous painting object rather than as a paper-based edition — a position that connects her to the broader lineage of Japanese painting-and-printmaking interchange (her academic department is Painting with a Printmaking specialization, not Printmaking as such).

Within the Japanese contemporary print scene Miyauchi is one of a small number of younger printmakers actively pursuing the painting-print boundary as a sustained area of inquiry, and one of the most-watched figures in the post-2020 Tama Art University printmaking cohort. Her online presence is maintained through yuu-miyauchi.tumblr.com and Instagram (@yuumiyauchi13).