Michael W. Schneider

Michael W. Schneider (born 1967, Austria) is an Austrian printmaker, performance artist, and educator whose practice has operated continuously across the Vienna and Tokyo print scenes since 1990. He is currently Professor of Printmaking at the Faculty of Fine Arts, Tokyo University of the Arts (Tokyo Geidai), having been promoted to the full professorship in April 2024 after serving there as Associate Professor since October 2015. He is also a Visiting Professor at Tama Art University, Tokyo (since April 2026).

Schneider holds a Magister Artium from the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna's Printmaking Department (1991), a Diploma in Japanese language from Yokohama National University (1993), a Master of Fine Arts from the Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music (Tokyo Geidai), Printmaking Department (1997), and a Habilitation (Privatdozent) for Graphic Arts with an emphasis in Printmaking and Print Media from the University of Applied Arts Vienna (2014). The double Vienna–Tokyo formation is the structural fact of his career: he has worked between the two cities for more than three decades, holding teaching positions at the University of Applied Arts Vienna (Senior Artist, 2007–2015), Webster University Vienna (2003–2013) and its St. Louis campus (from 2013), the Shanghai Academy of Fine Arts (Guest Professor, 2017–2018), Sint Lucas Antwerpen (Guest Professor, 2025), the Dresden Academy of Fine Arts (2024), and Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo (Visiting Artist, 2013).

His primary studio practice is woodblock printing, which he has pursued intensively since 1990. His distinctive technical signature is the use of stones found in nature — picked up on the street, in fields, or on pilgrimage — as carving tools to chisel structures into the woodblock surface, in place of the traditional knives and gouges. Since his Tokyo Geidai training in the 1990s he has used water-based substances including Indian ink, pigment, and graphite to ink the plates, in keeping with mokuhanga technique. The result is a practice that combines the disciplined material vocabulary of mokuhanga with an idiosyncratic mark-making register that is partly geological — the print surface registers the trace of a specific found stone.

His public-art project übertragung/transfer belongs among his major works and includes a permanent printed artwork installed in the Vienna U-Bahn at Johnstraße station on the U3 line (2010). An earlier Vienna woodblock series, unentschlüsselte Tafel.Rekonstruktionen (Reconstructions of Undeciphered Tablets, 1998), launched a typological vocabulary that has run through his career — an interest in the printed surface as a half-legible, half-occulted record-bearing object.

Schneider has also developed a synaesthetic performance practice. He works in the ensemble Klopfzeichen (Tap Codes) with Barbara Romen (hammered dulcimer) and Gunter Schneider (guitar) — an inclusive performance concept in which the sound produced during the carving and printing of a woodblock is incorporated as the percussive structuring element of an improvised free-music performance combining visual art, music, and literature.

He is the recipient of the Theodor-Körner Prize (2005) for his research in non-toxic and computer-aided printmaking. He has directed the Vienna imprint Edition ps since 1996, and his work has also been shown internationally through Global Print in the Douro region of Portugal. His prints are held in public collections including the Albertina and the graphic collection of the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, the Machida City Museum of Graphic Arts in Tokyo, the Shanghai Art Museum, and the National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts, and he has exhibited widely across Europe, Asia, and the Americas.

Within the international mokuhanga community, Schneider is a structurally important figure: a Tokyo Geidai-trained Western printmaker who has remained materially engaged with both the Vienna and Tokyo print communities for thirty-five years, and who has used his teaching positions on three continents to mediate between European, North American, and Japanese contemporary woodblock practice.