Toshiya Takahama

Toshiya Takahama (高浜利也) is a Japanese printmaker and educator whose practice centres on copperplate etching as a tool of place-based engagement. He is a Professor at Musashino Art University in Tokyo and one of the most consistently productive copperplate practitioners working in the Japanese print scene since the late 1980s.

Takahama trained at Musashino Art University in Tokyo, completing a Bachelor of Fine Arts in the Department of Painting (College of Art and Design) in 1988 with a printmaking specialisation, and an MFA from the same university's Graduate School of Art and Design in 1990. He has been on the Musashino faculty for several decades and has held visiting and guest positions at the Vilnius Academy of Arts (Lithuania) and other European print departments.

His early body of work consisted of large monochrome copperplate prints with abstract shapes. After participating in artist-in-residence programmes both in Japan and overseas — including extended periods in Shanghai, Bangkok, Hokkaido, and Echigo-Tsumari (the major Japanese rural-art-festival region) — his interests broadened to encompass not only art but also architecture, cities, and society as the subject of his prints. The mature period of his practice has produced site-specific copperplate-print series rooted in the named places he has visited and worked, with the visual vocabulary moving from abstract to architectural-figurative.

The Marunouchi Series (M 1-1-1 and related plates) is the most-published of his recent commissioned works: a 26-print copperplate-etching cycle made for Palace Hotel Tokyo's Marunouchi headquarters that depicts the area near the hotel — the silence at the moat's edge of the Imperial Palace, the contrast with the Marunouchi office towers, the corner of architecture and natural water and vegetation that defines that part of central Tokyo. Each plate is 450 × 450 mm, executed in his characteristic 'simple and primitive' line.

Takahama is also one of the principals of the Ochiishi Project (Ikeda + Ide + Takahama), an itinerant print-and-art project staged for five days each August at the site of the old radiotelegraph station on Cape Ochiishi, Hokkaido's eastern Nemuro Peninsula. The project anchors his practice within the Japanese site-specific contemporary-print scene that has developed around Echigo-Tsumari, the Setouchi Triennale, and the various residency-driven rural arts programs that characterise post-2000 Japanese contemporary art.

Alongside his teaching, exhibition, and Ochiishi work, Takahama has been a participant in numerous Japanese and international print exhibitions, has lectured at the Vilnius Academy of Arts Graphic Art Department, and is a long-standing presence in the Tokyo print community. His prints are held in collections including the Musashino Art University collection and various Japanese institutional and corporate holdings.

Within the contemporary Japanese print scene Takahama is a representative figure of the long-form copperplate practice — an artist for whom the etching plate is not a vehicle for image production but a sustained slow medium of place-recording, and whose work moves between specific named sites in Japan and Asia rather than through pure abstraction or pure figuration.