Nao Osada

Nao Osada (born 1988, Kanagawa Prefecture) is a Japanese printmaker whose practice is one of the more conceptually rigorous contemporary responses to the question of what a printed image is. She studied at the Tokyo University of the Arts (Tokyo Geidai), completing an undergraduate degree in oil painting in 2012 and a master's degree in 2016. Her central method is to use silkscreen printing — and increasingly UV inkjet printing — to transfer photographs of everyday found objects onto physical support materials that resemble or replicate the original objects.

The technique folds three things into one: the original object (a packing-tape strip, a paper cup, a piece of marble, a pebble), the photograph of that object printed at scale, and the synthetic substrate (acrylic, marble, paper, stone) that mimics the original, leaving the viewer to negotiate which is being presented. Her recent works include the Packing Material series (2023; screenprint, UV inkjet print, and acrylic), the Stained Paper Cup series (2023; screenprint and marble), and the Silica Gel and Pebbles series (2022; screenprint, UV inkjet print, acrylic, and pebble, at roughly 4.5–6.7 cm). The works are deliberately object-scaled — domestic rather than gallery-scaled — and pose as the things they represent. Her 2023 solo exhibition Looking Around What's Close at Hand at Maki Fine Arts in Tokyo consolidated this body of work.

Osada's exhibition record from the mid-2010s forward is concentrated in Tokyo's experimental-art circuit, with solo shows at Open Letter (2016 and 2018), NADiff Window Gallery (2022), and Maki Fine Arts (2020, 2022, and 2023), and group showings that extend to Europe and the United States. In 2025 her work was included in the PATinKyoto Print Art Triennale at the Kyoto City Kyocera Museum of Art. Within contemporary Japanese print, Osada represents one of the more distinctive turns in the post-2015 generation: she treats printmaking not as the production of editioned images on paper but as the production of object-scaled hybrid works that operate at the boundary between print, photography, and sculpture.