Masaki Sugimoto

Masaki Sugimoto (杉本将己, born 1997) is an emerging Japanese printmaker who works in intaglio, including etching. He belongs to the post-2020 generation of Tokyo University of the Arts (Tokyo Geidai) artists who have treated oil painting and printmaking as closely related rather than separate disciplines, moving intuitively between painted, drawn, and printed image-making.

Sugimoto is associated with the printmaking studio (版画研究室) at Tokyo Geidai, which sits within the university's oil-painting department, and he has been listed there as a research assistant. Working in the slower, more deliberate processes of intaglio, he uses printmaking to extend the kinds of figuration and narrative more often associated with painting.

His prints range across figurative scenes, still-life and object-based compositions, and quietly surreal narrative subjects, sharing a common interest in the everyday and the uncanny — images that hover between the directly observed and the half-imagined.

Sugimoto's career is at an early stage relative to the senior figures elsewhere in this database, and his trajectory is still in formation. Within the contemporary Japanese print scene he represents a particular and identifiable type — the Geidai-trained artist who treats intaglio as a vehicle for storytelling and figurative experimentation rather than as a technically defined craft tradition.