Masaki Sugimoto

Masaki Sugimoto (杉本将己) is an emerging Japanese printmaker working primarily in etching and intaglio, whose practice is rooted in the post-2020 generation of Tokyo Geidai-trained artists who have moved between oil painting and printmaking as related rather than separate disciplines. Born in Chiba Prefecture in 1997, he is one of a cohort of young Japanese print artists who entered the studio at a moment when traditional categorical boundaries between media were already loosening, and his work reflects an intuitive movement between painted, drawn, and printed image-making.

Sugimoto graduated from Tokyo University of the Arts (Tokyo Geidai) in 2021 from the Faculty of Fine Arts, Painting Department, with a specialization in Oil Painting. He continued his training at the same institution in the Master's programme of the Graduate School of Fine Arts, where he affiliated with the Printmaking studio (specifically Etching 2) under the Painting Department's expanded specialization. The migration from oil painting to etching is a deliberately marked decision in his trajectory: rather than treating printmaking as a parallel branch, he uses the slower and more deliberate processes of intaglio to extend the kinds of figuration and narrative that originated in his painting practice.

Sugimoto's imagery moves between figurative scenes — works with titles such as 'Two People' (ふたり), 'Gorilla,' and 'Monkey' — still-life and object-based compositions including 'Blades and Whetstone' and 'Hydrangea,' and quietly surreal narrative pieces with titles like 'Dream During a Break,' 'August 17th,' 'Recent Favorite,' and 'Unidentified Creature.' Other works in his portfolio venture into more abstract territory, with titles such as 'Thrilling,' 'Round World,' and a pair of compositions titled 'Color.' Across these subjects, the prints share a common interest in the everyday and uncanny — the kind of image that hovers between the directly observed and the half-imagined.

Sugimoto exhibited a mixed-media work titled 'Creation of My Room' as part of the 2022 Tokyo University of the Arts Graduation Works Exhibition, presented through the Master's programme in Oil Painting / Printmaking. His prints have circulated through the Geidai Art Plaza (the official commercial gallery of Tokyo University of the Arts), where his portfolio of approximately thirteen works is presented to the public, and through the YOUANDART online platform, which represents a roster of younger Japanese contemporary printmakers.

Sugimoto's career is at an early stage relative to the senior figures elsewhere in this database, and his future trajectory is still in formation. Within the contemporary Japanese print scene, however, he represents a particular and identifiable type — the Geidai-trained artist who treats etching as a vehicle for storytelling and figurative experimentation rather than as a technically defined craft tradition. His work is being collected and circulated through institutional channels (Geidai Art Plaza, YOUANDART) that have become important for emerging Japanese printmakers in a period when conventional gallery representation has thinned.