Biography
Chiaki Shuji (集治千晶) is a Kyoto-based Japanese contemporary artist who works across printmaking, painting, sculpture, and stained glass — with printmaking forming the core of a practice that has sustained her for nearly three decades. Born in Kyoto in 1973, she trained in printmaking through both undergraduate and graduate study at two of Kyoto's principal art institutions, and she has since exhibited continuously in Japan, the United States, Europe, and across Asia. The slug 'shoji-chiaki' in this database refers to a phonetic disambiguation of her surname (集治, read as 'Shuji' in Hepburn romanization but sometimes rendered 'Shouji' or confused with the more common surname 庄司 / 'Shoji'); she is the printmaker featured in the 2013 'Redefining the Multiple: Thirteen Japanese Printmakers' exhibition at the Bates College Museum of Art, not the Tochigi-based ceramic artist of similar name.
Shuji graduated from the Department of Printmaking at Kyoto Seika University in 1996, then completed a Master's degree in painting/printmaking at Kyoto City University of the Arts (Kyoto Geidai) in 1998. She also pursued post-graduate study as a visiting artist at Montana State University in the United States, an exchange that initiated a long ongoing engagement with American printmaking circles. Across these studies she developed the technical foundation that supports her current practice — work that frequently combines watercolour with various intaglio and relief print techniques.
Shuji's imagery favours flowers, the universe, sparkling lights, and the sky, and her sensibility brings out distinctly Japanese sensibilities about colour: the soft luminosity, the layered translucence, the way pigment can appear to gather rather than to be applied. Critics have described the work as gorgeous and delicate while at the same time 'full of primordial power' — a productive tension between refined surface and potent underlying force. She has also developed an extensive 'Playing with Dolls' series, in which the artist treats dolls and figurines as mysterious entities that simultaneously evoke the appearance of life and serve as vessels for self-projection. More recent exhibitions have taken up themes of life, death, and impermanence — for the 2025 'Radiant Altar' (華やぎの祭壇) exhibition at KUNST ARZT in Kyoto, she wrote: 'When seeing blooming flowers, I simultaneously perceive their withered state. Similarly, living greedily as a human is always accompanied by death.'
Shuji's awards include the Fujitsu Prize at the Sapporo International Contemporary Print Biennial (1998), an Ikeda Masuo Memorial Art Award commendation (2003), the Kyoto City New Artist Award (2005), the Kyoto City Mayor's Prize and Collection Award (2006), and the Print Grand Prix at the Hamamatsu Municipal Art Museum (2014). She has shown in international print biennials and triennials in Taiwan, Bulgaria, Poland, Korea, and Japan, and was one of the thirteen artists selected for the 2013 'Redefining the Multiple: 13 Japanese Printmakers' exhibition co-curated by Hideki Kimura and Sam Yates that travelled from the Bates College Museum of Art to the Ewing Gallery at the University of Tennessee and other venues.
Key Facts
- Active Period
- 1973
- Nationality
- 🇯🇵Japan
- Movement
- Contemporary Mokuhanga
- Works Indexed
- 1
Frequently Asked Questions
Chiaki Shuji (集治千晶) is a Kyoto-based Japanese contemporary artist who works across printmaking, painting, sculpture, and stained glass — with printmaking forming the core of a practice that has sustained her for nearly three decades. Born in Kyoto in 1973, she trained in printmaking through both undergraduate and graduate study at two of Kyoto's principal art institutions, and she has since exhibited continuously in Japan, the United States, Europe, and across Asia. The slug 'shoji-chiaki' in this database refers to a phonetic disambiguation of her surname (集治, read as 'Shuji' in Hepburn romanization but sometimes rendered 'Shouji' or confused with the more common surname 庄司 / 'Shoji'); she is the printmaker featured in the 2013 'Redefining the Multiple: Thirteen Japanese Printmakers' exhibition at the Bates College Museum of Art, not the Tochigi-based ceramic artist of similar name.
Chiaki Shuji was active born in 1973. They were associated with the Contemporary Mokuhanga movement.
Chiaki Shuji'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.