Naruki Oshima

Naruki Oshima (大島成己, born 1963, Osaka) 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. He lives and works in Kyoto.

Oshima's training combines Japanese and German formations. He earned a Ph.D. in Fine Art 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 architectural framing, and conceptual control over the photographic surface — is the structural reference for his subsequent work.

His principal earlier body of work is 'Reflections,' a series of fascinating images of contemporary glass façades created through straightforward 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 more recent work, 'Haptic Green' (Kehrer Verlag, 2014), uses a more sophisticated 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 which the human eye could never have seen. The Haptic Green book was published by Kehrer Verlag in Heidelberg under 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 — for the Festival Phot'Aix in France. He was also included in the touring 'Redefining the Multiple: Thirteen Japanese Printmakers' exhibition that originated at the Ewing Gallery, University of Tennessee, Knoxville — the principal English-language survey of contemporary Japanese print practice in the United States in the 2010s — placing him alongside Nobuaki Onishi and the wider Kyoto-Geidai contemporary printmaking community.

His representation includes Anti-Utopias and Ocula's contemporary art platform, plus the photo-book imprint Shashasha (which produces and distributes his Haptic Green book). The bridge between his Düsseldorf-Becher school photographic conceptualism and the Japanese print tradition has made him a frequent reference in writing on what 'the multiple' means in contemporary Japanese art — a question that has structurally driven the curatorial framing of post-2000s Japanese print survey exhibitions.

Within contemporary Japanese printmaking he is the photographic-medium representative of a generation of Japan-based artists for whom the print as conceptual category extends beyond ink-on-paper to include the editioned photograph and the algorithmic-composite image. His Düsseldorf training distinguishes him from the predominantly Tokyo-Geidai-trained cohort and gives his work a recognisable conceptual lineage that connects post-1990s Japanese photography with European post-conceptual print practice.