Chika Osaka

Chika Osaka (born 1984, Tokyo) is a Japanese printmaker who works principally in lithography, producing densely narrative editions in which solitary female figures move through dreamlike interior spaces saturated with patterned dresses, ambiguous still-life objects, and fragments of text. She is one of the most prominent printmakers of her generation in Japan and has exhibited steadily across East Asia and Europe since the late 2000s.

Osaka was educated entirely at Tokyo University of the Arts (Tokyo Geidai), the country's most prestigious public art university. She received a B.F.A. in Painting in 2009 and continued in graduate study at the same institution, completing an M.F.A. in Print in 2011. Within the printmaking department she studied under Takemi Azumaya, the lithography master whose teaching has shaped a generation of younger Japanese stone-printers; she has cited Azumaya's influence as the reason she chose lithography as her primary medium. Her training also exposed her to the Japanese woodcut tradition, and her mature work fuses an Edo-period sense of patterned surface with a contemporary illustrational sensibility.

Her lithographs typically center on a solitary woman or a small group of figures shown in a moment of private feeling — staring at the wood grain of a floor, holding a hand to a face, lying among objects after a meal. Many of her titles read like single-sentence prose poems: Trying not to fall into the hole of emptiness; Hope it won't be pickles; The rice that just served; We left behind, and this is the world. I wish to continue this world. The figures wear elaborately patterned dresses set against flat backgrounds, with selective embossing used to lift specific elements out of the printed surface. Trees, plants, and leaves frequently enter the compositions as decorative borders or as the only figurative content sharing the page with the woman.

Osaka's awards include the Jerwood Printmaking Today Prize at the London Original Print Fair at the Royal Academy in 2019, a Selected Prize at the VOCA Exhibition (a Tokyo showcase for emerging contemporary artists) in 2014, the Grand Prize of the Adachi Contemporary Ukiyo-e Award in 2013, and the Atsuhiko Shima Prize at the Shell Art Award in 2010. She also received a number of award nominations and prizes from graduation and print-association exhibitions while she was completing her studies in 2008-2009.

Her work is held in public collections including the Machida City Museum of Graphic Arts in Tokyo — Japan's principal museum dedicated to printmaking — as well as the Zhejiang Art Museum and the Shanghai Peninsula Art Museum in China. Solo exhibitions over the past decade have appeared in Tokyo, Munich, Taipei, Kyoto, and Switzerland; recent group shows include the Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum and the National Art Center, Tokyo. In 2023 she presented "Love Letters" at the Museum Franz Gertsch in Burgdorf, Switzerland, a solo project drawing on the personal correspondence and diaristic register that has long been an undercurrent in her work.

Osaka is represented by Gallery MoMo in Tokyo and is handled by international dealers including Hanga Ten in the U.S. Her output across the past fifteen years has been unusually consistent: lithograph editions printed in saturated color, mounted on heavy cream paper, with embossing and selective spot color used to layer the figural narrative. Critics have located her in a small but distinctive cohort of younger Japanese printmakers — alongside artists such as Mariko Ando — who use traditional Japanese print media to construct a contemporary diaristic imagery rooted in private feeling rather than in landscape or external observation.