Tamayo Oishi

Tamayo Oishi (born 1999, Tokyo, Japan) is a young Japanese contemporary printmaker working primarily in silkscreen, currently based in Tokyo. She trained at Joshibi University of Art and Design (the principal Japanese women's art university) and completed graduate studies at the same institution. At 26 she is among the youngest CWAJ-circulating Japanese printmakers in the 2025 catalogue and represents the youngest cohort of Joshibi-trained Tokyo women printmakers.

Her 2023 silkscreen 'Everlasting Summer Garden in the Hotel's Backyard' (常夏の庭はホテルのbackyardで, 59 × 80 cm), exhibited at the 68th CWAJ Print Show 2025, exemplifies the visual register of her early practice: a substantial horizontal silkscreen composition with a deliberately atypical Japanese-English mixed-language title that foregrounds the cosmopolitan, contemporary tone of her work. The Japanese title — combining 常夏 ('eternal summer'), 庭 ('garden'), ホテル ('hotel'), and English-loanword 'backyard' — produces a title that is recognizably contemporary Japanese-young-artist register.

The 'Everlasting Summer Garden in the Hotel's Backyard' subject — a hotel garden, perpetually summery, observed from a back-of-house vantage — sits within a contemporary urban-and-leisure-space subject vocabulary that contrasts with the seasonal-traditional-landscape register that dominates senior CWAJ printmakers. The substantial 80 cm horizontal scale and the silkscreen technique together signal a contemporary commercial-and-fine-art crossover register that is becoming more common among younger Joshibi-trained printmakers.

Oishi's training at Joshibi University of Art and Design connects her to the same Joshibi-trained Tokyo printmaking lineage as Yurie Mamiya (b. 1972), Terumi Oishi (b. 1988, also in this batch — but distinct from Tamayo), Suzuki Tomoe, and others. Within the Joshibi-trained cohort she represents the youngest current generation, just out of graduate school and entering the principal Japanese print showcase circuit through CWAJ.

The silkscreen technique she has chosen as her principal medium produces strong flat-colour areas with crisp edge definition, a register well-suited to the contemporary urban-leisure subject matter and the cosmopolitan title vocabulary. Silkscreen is also the medium most readily compatible with editioning at higher numbers and with a price point accessible to younger collectors — practical factors that may have informed her medium choice.

Within the contemporary Japanese print scene Oishi represents the youngest emerging cohort of Joshibi-trained Tokyo women silkscreen printmakers, working in a contemporary urban-cosmopolitan subject register. Her CWAJ Print Show 2025 selection (Print No. 120) marks her early-career emergence within the principal Japanese print showcase. Note that 'oishi' as a Japanese surname (大石) is shared with Terumi Oishi (b. 1988), also in this batch — but the two are distinct artists at different career stages and in different media. Beyond the CWAJ catalogue entry, biographical detail and exhibition history are not currently surfaced through public-facing online channels.