Naruki Oshima

Naruki Oshima (大島成己, born 1963) is a Japanese photographer and conceptual print artist whose practice operates principally through large-format film photography but is included in international surveys of contemporary Japanese printmaking through his role in 'Redefining the Multiple: Thirteen Japanese Printmakers' and his sustained involvement with the editioned-photograph tradition.

Oshima's training combines Japanese and German formations. He earned a Ph.D. in Fine Arts from Kyoto City University of Arts in 2010 and studied in Thomas Ruff's class at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf from 2001 to 2003. The Düsseldorf Becher-school photographic lineage — emphasising large-format film, frontal framing, and conceptual control over the photographic surface — is the structural reference for his subsequent work. Since 2014 he has been a professor in the graphic arts (printmaking) course at Tama Art University.

His principal earlier body of work is 'Reflections,' a series of images of contemporary glass façades created through 4 × 5 inch film photography with subtle digital reworking. The series treats the reflective glass surface as a visual register that simultaneously shows what is in front of and behind the photographer, producing images that operate as conceptual print multiples in the photographic medium.

His later work, 'Haptic Green' (Kehrer Verlag, 2014), uses a more elaborate technique. With the camera fixed at a precise point, the artist methodically shoots a series of images from the bottom-left corner of a natural scene to the top-right, applying various focuses, then reassembles the shots and erases overlaps and distortions to produce a finalised image that offers a view of nature the human eye could never have seen. The Haptic Green book was published by Kehrer Verlag in Heidelberg (ISBN 978-3-86828-490-4) and was reviewed in Lenscratch and other photo-book outlets.

In 2015 Oshima exhibited as part of a loose collective with other Japanese photographers — Ken Kitano, Yuji Hamada, Miki Nitadori, Risaku Suzuki, Kazuyoshi Usui, and Yuki Onodera — at the Festival Phot'Aix in France, a collaboration the group has continued in later years. He was also included in the touring 'Redefining the Multiple: Thirteen Japanese Printmakers' exhibition, which originated at the Ewing Gallery of Art and Architecture at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, and travelled to several US venues, placing him alongside Nobuaki Onishi and the other printmakers in that survey.

His Haptic Green project is produced and distributed through the photo-book imprint Shashasha. The bridge between his Düsseldorf-Becher-school photographic conceptualism and the Japanese print tradition has made his work a reference point in writing on what 'the multiple' means in contemporary Japanese art — a question that has shaped the curatorial framing of post-2000s Japanese print survey exhibitions.

Within contemporary Japanese printmaking he stands as a photographic-medium participant in a generation of Japan-based artists for whom the print as a conceptual category extends beyond ink-on-paper to include the editioned photograph and the composite image. His Düsseldorf training gives his work a recognisable conceptual lineage that connects post-1990s Japanese photography with European post-conceptual practice.