Biography
Aeri Park (born 1992, Tokyo) is a Korean-Japanese printmaker whose copper-plate intaglio practice traces her family history as a third-generation Zainichi Korean — Korean residents of Japan who came to Japan during the colonial period or whose families remained after 1945. Born in Tokyo and raised in Gyeonggi Province in South Korea, she returned to Japan for art school and graduated from Musashino Art University with a major in printmaking in 2021, where she has continued into the master's program. Her bilingual upbringing and the back-and-forth between Korea and Japan are the explicit subject of her work.
For her undergraduate graduation project Park made a copper-plate print derived from a photograph of her grandmother, a first-generation Zainichi Korean, working at the Modaikogyo factory in Osaka during the war. The image — translated through aquatint and etching into the muted tonal range of intaglio — set the central concern of her practice: the intergenerational transmission of memory through documentary family photographs reworked as etched plates. Her recent prints continue to depict family members and childhood memories as the visible surface of the larger Zainichi history.
Her competition record from her graduation year forward has been unusually rapid. In 2017 (still an undergraduate) she was selected for the 3rd Nami International Picture Book Illustration Competition. In 2020 she was selected for the Genkosha Illustration 214th The Choice. In 2021 she was selected for the 5th Awagami International Mini-Print Exhibition and won the Excellence Award at the 8th Kanae Yamamoto Printmaking Grand Prize. In 2023 she received the Second Prize and Gallery Award at the IAG Awards Exhibition, mounted her debut solo exhibition Self-Portrait at Gallery MoMo Projects in Tokyo, and earned the Outstanding Award at the Japan Society of Printmaking's 48th annual exhibition. The CWAJ Print Show selected her in 2023, and the 4th PATinKyoto Kyoto Print Triennale selected her work for 2025.
The Self-Portrait solo show at Gallery MoMo Projects (Tokyo, October 2023) consolidated her practice around portraiture: not as conventional likeness but as the act of carving a printing plate to register the imprint of an ancestor. The curator Hayashi Satoshi (Gallery Nomart) describes her work as connecting individual memory and society through the material act of carving. Her output remains modest in scale — small to mid-format copper plates rather than large editions — but the technical assurance and the urgent biographical drive have made her one of the most-watched emerging Japanese intaglio voices of her cohort.
Park is represented online at aeripark.myportfolio.com and is active on Instagram (@aeriparkworks). Her gallery affiliation is with Gallery MoMo Projects in Tokyo. As a third-generation Zainichi printmaker working in a medium with deep roots in both Japanese and Korean tradition, she occupies a distinctive cross-cultural position; her work is part of the larger turn in younger Japanese printmaking toward identity-based and historically reflexive subject matter.
Key Facts
- Active Period
- 1992
- Nationality
- 🇯🇵Japan
- Movement
- Contemporary Mokuhanga
- Subjects
- Portraits
- Works Indexed
- 2
Frequently Asked Questions
Aeri Park (born 1992, Tokyo) is a Korean-Japanese printmaker whose copper-plate intaglio practice traces her family history as a third-generation Zainichi Korean — Korean residents of Japan who came to Japan during the colonial period or whose families remained after 1945. Born in Tokyo and raised in Gyeonggi Province in South Korea, she returned to Japan for art school and graduated from Musashino Art University with a major in printmaking in 2021, where she has continued into the master's program. Her bilingual upbringing and the back-and-forth between Korea and Japan are the explicit subject of her work.
Aeri Park was active born in 1992. They were associated with the Contemporary Mokuhanga movement.
Aeri Park'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.
Aeri Park's prints frequently feature portraits.
