Fumiko Miyazaki

Fumiko Miyazaki (born 1971, Osaka) is a Japanese lithographer whose mature practice has developed over more than two and a half decades of sustained engagement with the stone lithograph as medium. Trained at Tama Art University in Tokyo, she has built a body of work characterized by what she describes as an emotionally intuitive rather than intellectually programmatic approach to image-making — small forms, soft tonal grounds, and a vocabulary of abstract or near-abstract composition.

Miyazaki graduated from Tama Art University's graduate program in 1997. Her practice was recognized early: she joined the Japan Print Association exhibition cycle in 1995, while still a student, and won an Encouragement Prize in 1996, the year before her graduate course completion. In 1998 she received the Yamaguchi Genji New Artist Award (山口源新人賞) at the Japan Print Association exhibition — one of the most significant prizes for an emerging printmaker, named after the Showa-period printmaker Yamaguchi Genji and given annually to a single rising artist within the association's exhibition cycle.

A series of major prizes in the late 1990s and early 2000s consolidated her presence in the field. She received the Excellence Award at the 1st Kanagawa International Print Triennial in 1998 and the Sponsor Prize at the Sapporo International Print Biennial in 2000. The same year she was selected for the Krakow International Print Triennial in Poland, the most competitive juried international print exhibition in Europe. Solo exhibitions at the Shirota Gallery in Ginza in 1999 and 2000 established her commercial presence in Tokyo.

Her artistic statement is candid about her resistance to programmatic explanation. She writes that her work is about 'feelings perceived without explicit language' — the visual conveying meaning through suggestion rather than narrative. Her practice rests on the simple emotional responses of likes and dislikes as the foundation for what she describes as 'invisible forms within myself.' This commitment to a feeling-based register, rather than the more theoretically articulated practice of some contemporaries, has produced a body of work whose individual sheets read as small, lyrical, often chromatic compositions that ask the viewer to encounter them by sense rather than by interpretation.

Miyazaki's mature output is organized as a sequence of overlapping period series, viewable on her website (fumikomiyazaki.com) as 1995-2000, 2001-2007, 2008-2013, 2014-2016, 2017-2019, 2020-present. She also operates a lithograph print class (宮崎文子版画教室) in Osaka and teaches a children's art workshop (Doi Art どい・あーと). Her recent activity includes a 2024-2025 three-printmaker collaborative exhibition 'Kobe Biome — Endings and Beginnings,' alongside Miho Nakamura and Naatsuko Katahira, in which her lithographs are exhibited from December 19. She is a sustained member of the Japan Print Association and one of the consistently exhibiting Kansai-area lithographers of her generation.