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 been Professor of Printmaking in the Department of Fine Arts at Kyoto City University of Arts (Geidai Kyoto) since 2008 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-dimensional objects. Onishi's signature trompe-l'œil sculptures are made of cast glass that imitates everyday objects (boots, cans, bicycle tires, crumpled paper) 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 Geidai background in copperplate engraving and the parallel sculpture-as-multiple tradition derived from Marcel Duchamp and the Italian arte povera circle.

He was included in the major touring exhibition Redefining the Multiple: Thirteen Japanese Printmakers (Ewing Gallery, University of Tennessee, Knoxville, 2015 and onward), the principal English-language survey of contemporary Japanese print practice in the United States in the 2010s. 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 prints are held in the Kyoto City University of Arts Collection, the Machida City Museum of Graphic Arts (Tokyo), the Okayama Prefectural Museum of Art, the Hyogo Prefectural Museum of Art, the Museum of Kyoto, the Kyoto Saga University of Arts, and the Zabludowicz Collection (London).

He is represented by Gallery Nomart in Osaka and is one of the most consistent contributors to the Kyoto-based PATinKyoto Print Triennale (he was included in the inaugural 2013 edition). Within contemporary Japanese printmaking he is notable for the dual identity of his practice — copperplate-print education at Kyoto Geidai on one hand, conceptual sculptural-multiple production with cast glass on the other — and is one of the principal figures cited when Japanese contemporary art writers describe the post-2000 expansion of 'the multiple' beyond the printed sheet.