Kouseki Ono

Kouseki Ono (born 1979, Kurashiki, Okayama Prefecture) is a Japanese printmaker whose extreme-overprinting silkscreen technique has made him one of the most distinctive figures in contemporary Japanese print art. He completed a B.A. at Tokyo Zokei University in 2004 and an M.F.A. in printmaking at the Tokyo University of the Arts (Tokyo Geidai) in 2006. His central technique is a silkscreen process in which a single fine-mesh screen carrying tiny diamond-shaped marks is printed over the same plate sixty to one hundred times, with each layer using a different ink color, producing not a flat printed image but a dense field of stacked ink columns standing several millimetres above the paper surface.

The resulting prints — associated with his 'Hundred Layers of Colors' series — read differently from different angles and heights, because the visible color of each column depends on which lateral side of the stack catches the light. The technique departs sharply from standard silkscreen practice and is widely regarded as one of the more genuinely innovative contemporary print processes to emerge from Japan in recent decades.

His competition record from 2007 onward documents the rapid recognition of the technique: the Grand Prix at Prints Tokyo 2007; the Grand Prize at the 2nd NBC Silk Screen Biennale in 2009, the year he was also selected for the 3rd Shiseido Art Egg exhibition; the VOCA Prize (the Vision of Contemporary Art award, one of the most-watched Japanese mid-career prizes) together with the Grand Prix of the Okayama Art Prize in 2015; and the Grand Prix of the 2nd PAT in Kyoto Print Art Triennale in 2016.

Solo exhibitions have included the Nagi Museum of Contemporary Art (Okayama, 2010) and Galerie Ashiya Schule (Hyōgo, 2015), and he has shown regularly at Yoseido Gallery and Art Front Gallery in Tokyo. His work has also appeared in group exhibitions at the Yokohama Museum of Art and the Sezon Museum of Modern Art, and internationally at the Kala Art Institute (Berkeley, California, 2014). The 2024 solo shows at MARGIN GALLERY and YOKOTA|TOKYO continued his Tokyo presence.

Ono has expanded the practice into three-dimensional and installation contexts. His 'scale head' series embeds the printed ink columns into animal skulls, and his 'fleeting flower' (Adabana) series uses cicada shells as the substrate for the same overprinting process. His work was included in the 2013 traveling exhibition Redefining the Multiple: Thirteen Japanese Printmakers, shown at venues including the Bates College Museum of Art and the University of Tennessee, which presented him among a group of contemporary Japanese printmakers expanding the boundaries of the print.

His work is held in the collections of the Machida City Museum of Graphic Arts, the Sezon Museum of Modern Art, the Kyoto Municipal Museum of Art, the Urawa Art Museum, the Okayama Prefectural Museum of Art, and the Tikotin Museum of Japanese Art in Israel, among other public collections. He shows regularly with Yoseido Gallery and Art Front Gallery in Tokyo.

Within contemporary Japanese printmaking, Ono is one of the few figures whose practice can be described as a self-invented medium rather than a variant on an established print form. The VOCA Prize and the Okayama Art Prize in 2015 and the PAT in Kyoto Grand Prix in 2016 together marked his arrival as a significant voice in the cohort that has redefined Japanese contemporary print across the 2010s.