Nobuaki Onishi

Nobuaki Onishi (大西伸明, born 1972, Okayama Prefecture) is a Japanese printmaker and sculptor whose work occupies the threshold between print multiples and trompe-l'œil sculptural objects. He has taught printmaking in the Department of Fine Arts at Kyoto City University of Arts since 2008, where he is now a Professor, and is one of the most distinctive contemporary practitioners of the multiple in Japan.

Onishi trained at Saga Junior College of Arts (BFA, Printmaking, 1994) and at Kyoto City University of Arts, where he completed his MFA in Printmaking in 1998. He has remained based in Kyoto throughout his career, joining the Kyoto City University of Arts faculty as a full-time instructor in printmaking in 2008 and rising to professor.

His primary studio practice is copperplate engraving, but the conceptual frame of his work has been the print as multiple — and his most-cited bodies of work translate that conceptual category into three dimensions. Onishi's signature trompe-l'œil sculptures are cast in resin to imitate everyday objects — among them a shovel, a nail, and a leaf — so closely that they read as the original, a sculptural extension of the print's promise of perfect reproduction. The work straddles the boundary between his Kyoto training in copperplate engraving and the readymade-and-multiple tradition associated with Marcel Duchamp.

He was included in the touring exhibition Redefining the Multiple: Thirteen Japanese Printmakers, organized by the Ewing Gallery at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, which toured United States venues through the 2010s and stands as a significant English-language survey of contemporary Japanese print practice. His prints and sculptures have shown internationally, including in Toronto, Melbourne, Sydney, Seoul, and Taipei, and he has had work acquired by the Zabludowicz Collection in London.

Major awards include the Grand Prix, Selected Artists in Kyoto (2004); the Asunaro Prize at the Aomori Print Triennale (2007); the Grand Prize at the inaugural Okayama Prefectural Rising Artists Award (2008); the Goto Memorial Cultural Award (2012); the Kyoto Prefecture Cultural Award Encouragement Prize (2013); and the Kyoto Print Triennale Second Prize (2013). His work is held in public collections including the Kyoto City University of Arts, the Machida City Museum of Graphic Arts (Tokyo), and the Zabludowicz Collection (London), among other Japanese public collections.

He is represented by Gallery Nomart in Osaka and has contributed to the Kyoto-based PATinKyoto Print Triennale, where he was recognized in the 2013 edition. Within contemporary Japanese printmaking he is notable for the dual identity of his practice — copperplate-print education at Kyoto on one hand, conceptual sculptural-multiple production in cast resin on the other — and is one of the figures cited when Japanese contemporary art writers describe the post-2000 expansion of 'the multiple' beyond the printed sheet.