Kansuke Morioka

Kansuke Morioka (森岡完介, born 1941 in Nagoya, Aichi Prefecture) is a senior Japanese printmaker who has worked primarily in silkscreen and has remained based in the Nagoya area throughout his career. He graduated from the fine-art department of Aichi Gakugei University — the institution now known as Aichi University of Education (Aichi Kyōiku Daigaku) — in 1964, and went on to build a long and prolific studio practice, producing hundreds of prints and holding well over a hundred solo exhibitions in Japan and abroad across roughly half a century.

His work takes the natural landscape as its central motif — the sea, beaches, deserts, tidal flats and forests — reworked not as direct transcription but from photographs of places he has himself passed through, so that recurring elements such as chairs, houses and boats read less as description than as quiet markers of a self moving through the natural world. He has made silkscreen a vehicle for this contemplative landscape imagery rather than for the graphic-design idiom with which the technique is often associated.

Morioka's work was recognized from early in his career: he received an award of excellence at the first Japan Contemporary Print Grand Prize exhibition in 1977, National Museum awards at the Kraków International Print Biennial, and the Aichi Prefecture Art and Culture Award in 1983. His silkscreen prints have also been shown in the College Women's Association of Japan (CWAJ) Print Show — the long-running annual print exhibition held in Tokyo — alongside solo presentations at galleries in Nagoya and Tokyo. Within the contemporary Japanese print scene he represents the senior generation of regional printmakers who trained in the central-Japan teacher-training universities and sustained a serious print practice outside the Tokyo–Kyoto axis. Beyond these exhibition records and museum holdings, a fuller English-language biography is not currently surfaced through public online channels.