Biography
Kouseki Ono (born 1979, Kurashiki, Okayama Prefecture) is a Japanese printmaker whose extreme-overprinting silkscreen technique has made him one of the most distinctive — and technically obsessive — 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 technical fact 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 five to six millimetres above the paper surface.
The resulting prints — known collectively as Hundred Layers of Color or simply the silkscreen pillar series — read differently from different angles and heights, because the visible color of each pillar depends on which lateral side of the stack catches the light. Ono has cited moth scales, moss colonies, and the rice fields of his Okayama hometown as the natural-world precedents for this optical effect. The technique has no precedent in standard silkscreen practice and is considered one of the most genuinely innovative contemporary print processes to come out of Japan since the 1990s.
His competition record from 2007 forward documents the rapid recognition of the technique: 2007 Prints Tokyo Grand Prize; 2009 NBC Silkscreen Biennial Grand Prize and 3rd Shiseido Art Egg exhibition; 2015 VOCA Award (the Vision of Contemporary Art Award, one of the most-watched Japanese mid-career prizes) and Okayama Art Prize Grand Prix; 2016 PAT in Kyoto Print Art Triennale Grand Prix. Solo exhibitions have included the Nagi Museum of Contemporary Art (Okayama, 2010), Yokohama Museum of Art and Sezon Museum of Modern Art group shows, the Ichihara Lakeside Museum (2014), Kala Gallery (San Francisco, 2014), and Galerie Ashiya Schule (2015). The 2024 solo shows at MARGIN GALLERY and YOKOTA|TOKYO continued his Tokyo presence, and Yoseido Gallery has shown his work regularly.
Ono has expanded the practice into three-dimensional and installation contexts. The Scaled Head series embeds the printed ink columns into animal skulls, and the Futoka series uses cicada exoskeletons as the substrate for the same overprinting process. The 2013 inclusion in Redefining the Multiple: Thirteen Japanese Printmakers (Bates College / University of Tennessee Knoxville / Rochester Contemporary) presented him alongside Hideki Kimura, Yoshioka Toshinao, and Saori Miyake as one of the principal younger Japanese print voices.
His work is held in the Machida International Print Museum (Machida City Museum of Graphic Arts), the Sezon Contemporary Art Museum, the Kyoto City Museum of Art, the Urawa Art Museum, the Tikotin Museum of Japanese Art (Israel), and at least nine other institutional collections. He is represented by Yoseido Gallery in Tokyo and Art Front Gallery for the larger installation works.
Key Facts
- Active Period
- 1979
- Nationality
- 🇯🇵Japan
- Movement
- Contemporary Mokuhanga
- Subjects
- Silkscreen
- Works Indexed
- 12
Frequently Asked Questions
Kouseki Ono (born 1979, Kurashiki, Okayama Prefecture) is a Japanese printmaker whose extreme-overprinting silkscreen technique has made him one of the most distinctive — and technically obsessive — 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 technical fact 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 five to six millimetres above the paper surface.
Kouseki Ono was active born in 1979. They were associated with the Contemporary Mokuhanga movement.
Kouseki Ono's work was shaped by the Contemporary Mokuhanga tradition in Japanese woodblock printmaking. Contemporary Mokuhanga: Contemporary mokuhanga (literally "wood-block print") encompasses artists working from approximately 1970 to the present who continue or reinvent traditional Japanese woodblock printing techniques.
Kouseki Ono's prints frequently feature silkscreen.
