Nami Nomura

Nami Nomura (born in Nagasaki Prefecture; birth year not publicly disclosed) is a Japanese printmaker whose practice merges silkscreen with digital photography and image-processing software to produce hybrid prints in which photographs of urban landscapes are overlaid with photographic textures of dirt, water droplets, and ambient surface detail. The work is included in the 4th PATinKyoto Print Art Triennale 2025, with recommendation from art critic and historian Suga Akira.

Nomura completed her graduate studies at Oita University Graduate School of Education in 2016. Since then she has been active in the Kyushu printmaking scene — Fukuoka, Oita, and the Japan-China-Korea Contemporary Artist Exchange circuit — while also exhibiting in Tokyo. Her exhibition history includes the Print Women's Association Exhibition at Gallery Oishi (Fukuoka, 2016), the Print Exchange Exhibition Vol.2 at Gallery Rutan (Tokyo, 2017), 'How to Walk in the Street: Observers on the Street' at Oita City Art Museum (2022), and the Japan-China-Korea Contemporary Artist Exchange Exhibition in OITA at the Oita Prefectural Art Museum (2022).

The defining technique of Nomura's practice is a layered photo-and-print procedure: she photographs a city street or building façade, digitally reconstructs the image into a flat photographic composition, then prints it as a fine inkjet on heavyweight artist paper (BFK Rives), and finally overprints silkscreen layers carrying photographs of micro-textures — clinging dirt, scattered water droplets, weathered surface marks — that re-introduce a tactile sense of weather, time, and physical presence to the otherwise sealed photographic surface. The featured 2020 work 'distant landscape' (920 x 1020 mm) on BFK Rives paper exemplifies the procedure.

This hybrid procedure places Nomura within an emerging generation of Japanese printmakers who use silkscreen as a contemporary photo-printing medium rather than as a flat-color graphic technique. Where the older Japanese silkscreen tradition (Endo Susumu, Yoshida Katsuro) was committed to flat colour fields and graphic abstraction, Nomura's silkscreen carries continuous-tone photography, with the screen's mesh grain itself becoming part of the surface vocabulary alongside the photographic image.

Nomura's online presence is concentrated at her Wix portfolio (nmrnm7.wixsite.com/naminomura) and Instagram (@nmr_nm). Her positioning within the contemporary Japanese print scene is as a younger Kyushu-based artist with a distinct technical-conceptual voice rather than as part of any larger movement; the inclusion in the 4th PATinKyoto provides her first major Kansai-area exposure since the Oita-Tokyo years.