Saki Murakami

Saki Murakami (born 1992, Takasaki, Gunma Prefecture; the slug 'murakami-sou' reflects an alternate reading of the personal name 早, sometimes romanized 'Saki' and sometimes 'Sō') is a Japanese printmaker who has emerged as one of the most distinctive young intaglio voices of her generation. She works in copperplate techniques — lift-ground etching, etching, aquatint, and spit-bite — to produce small-format figural images whose somatic, body-centered imagery is grounded in her own medical and family history.

Born into a family that operated a veterinary clinic in Takasaki City, Murakami underwent surgery at age four for a congenital heart condition. She has described the visual logic of her practice through the medical metaphor of the copper plate as 'heart,' the marks carved into it as 'wounds,' and the ink filled into those marks as 'blood' — a metaphor that the curator Sadaya Iwabuchi has used to characterize her work as well. The titles of her prints — Gnaw, Piggyback Ride, Fire of the Whole, History — and her preferred imagery of small figures bound, embraced, or piled together with a sense of physical pressure all extend the same body-relational vocabulary.

She graduated from Musashino Art University with a B.A. in Oil Painting and a focus in printmaking in 2014, then completed her M.F.A. in Printmaking at the same institution in 2016. She remains based in Ibaraki Prefecture. Her competition profile is unusually concentrated for an artist of her age: Superior Prize at FACE 2015 (the Sompo Japan Nipponkoa Art Award, Tokyo), Superior Prize at the 2017 Gunma Biennale for Young Artists (Museum of Modern Art Gunma), and the JOMO Cultural Award of Art in 2019.

Murakami's exhibition record reads as a survey of the Japanese contemporary print circuit. She has shown at the Tokyo Opera City Art Gallery, the National Art Center Tokyo, the Institut Français Tokyo, the Museum of Modern Art Gunma, the Machida City Museum of Graphic Arts, the Ueda City Museum of Art, and through the Takahashi Collection. Her solo exhibition Lake Ebisu at NADiff a/p/a/r/t (Tokyo, 2022) consolidated her position. Her work is held by the Machida City Museum of Graphic Arts, the Ueda City Museum of Art, and the Takahashi Collection.

The central technical fact of Murakami's practice is the laboriously tonal use of aquatint and spit-bite to give a small etched figure a kind of saturated psychological presence within a small sheet — typically not larger than 30 × 30 cm. The narrative compression and the pressed, intimate body postures recall European intaglio traditions (Käthe Kollwitz, Louise Bourgeois) more than the prevailing Japanese mokuhanga aesthetic, but the technical execution is grounded in the specific Japanese intaglio teaching at Musashino Art University.

Within the contemporary Japanese print scene Murakami is one of a small number of younger figural intaglio printmakers whose work has been collected by both regional Japanese public museums and the major Tokyo private collections (Takahashi Collection). Her PATinKyoto inclusion confirms her standing across both Tokyo and Kansai networks.