Biography
Shinpey Ozaki (born 1987, Sendai, Miyagi Prefecture; the slug 'ozaki-shinpei' arises from a romanisation variant — the artist's preferred romanisation in his PATinKyoto entry is 'Shinpey,' from 森平) is a Japanese painter and printmaker based in Sendai whose practice combines computer-generated preliminary sketches with stencil-based painting and printmaking on canvas, producing flat-affect images of suburban Japanese landscapes drained of human presence: parking lots, drive-throughs, light-industrial frontages, generic apartment blocks. He is included in batch-06 on the basis of his selection for the 3rd PATinKyoto Print Art Triennale 2022.
Ozaki graduated from Iwate University (2006-2010), located in Morioka in northeastern Japan. His regional positioning — Sendai as base, Iwate as alma mater, the Tohoku galleries (Cyg in Iwate, MORIOKA daiichi in Iwate) as recurring exhibition venues — distinguishes him from the dominant Tokyo-Kyoto-Osaka axis of contemporary Japanese print and places him within the post-2011-earthquake Tohoku artist community that has worked through that catastrophe in formally restrained terms.
The technical procedure of Ozaki's mature practice is layered: he generates the visual composition as a digital sketch using computer graphics, then translates the design onto cut paper or vinyl stencils that he applies to canvas, finally painting acrylic through the stencils to produce a flat, slightly graphic image that retains the indexical trace of the digital source. The PATinKyoto-documented works — 'Ceremony,' 'After the Gold Rush,' 'Oshirasama,' and 'Hotel' — depict the Japanese suburban built environment with a cool detachment that has been compared by curator Takahashi Shigemi to the Tohoku-region imagination's embedded experience of disaster-empty space.
Major exhibitions include 'DRY EYE' at Gallery TURNAROUND in Sendai (2016 — Sendai's principal experimental contemporary gallery, founded by photographer Sasaki Takashi), 'Lonely Planet' at MORIOKA daiichi gallery + Cyg art gallery in Iwate (2018), '1942019' at RED AND BLUE GALLERY in Tokyo (2019), and 'N.E.blood 21 vol.73' at the Rias Ark Museum of Art in Kesennuma (2020). VOCA 2016 selection at the Ueno Royal Museum and inclusion in 'Tricolore2019' at TOKI-NO-WASUREMONO Tokyo extend his presence to the Tokyo institutional circuit. His participation in multiple years of Art Festa Iwate at the Iwate Museum of Art establishes ongoing local institutional support.
Ozaki's positioning within the contemporary Japanese scene is as a Tohoku-anchored mid-career painter-printmaker whose hybrid digital-stencil practice reads more cleanly as 'expanded printmaking' than as either pure painting or pure conventional printmaking. The 2022 PATinKyoto selection placed him within the Kansai-area print-triennial context, while his ongoing Tohoku gallery base maintains his regional identity. Ozaki's name occasionally appears as 'Ozaki Shinpey' or 'Shinpei Ozaki' in different sources; his PATinKyoto entry uses 'Shinpey,' which is followed here.
Key Facts
- Active Period
- 1987
- Nationality
- 🇯🇵Japan
- Movement
- Contemporary Mokuhanga
- Subjects
- Landscapes
- Works Indexed
- 4
Frequently Asked Questions
Shinpey Ozaki (born 1987, Sendai, Miyagi Prefecture; the slug 'ozaki-shinpei' arises from a romanisation variant — the artist's preferred romanisation in his PATinKyoto entry is 'Shinpey,' from 森平) is a Japanese painter and printmaker based in Sendai whose practice combines computer-generated preliminary sketches with stencil-based painting and printmaking on canvas, producing flat-affect images of suburban Japanese landscapes drained of human presence: parking lots, drive-throughs, light-industrial frontages, generic apartment blocks. He is included in batch-06 on the basis of his selection for the 3rd PATinKyoto Print Art Triennale 2022.
Shinpey Ozaki was active born in 1987. They were associated with the Contemporary Mokuhanga movement.
Shinpey Ozaki'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.
Shinpey Ozaki's prints frequently feature landscapes.
