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. Born in 1966 in Himeji, Hyogo Prefecture, he is a Professor in the printmaking (Graphic Arts) programme of the Oil Painting Department at Musashino Art University in Tokyo, and has been one of the more consistently productive copperplate practitioners in the Japanese print scene for several decades.

Takahama completed his studies at Musashino Art University, earning an MFA from its Graduate School in 1990, and has been on the Musashino faculty ever since, more recently taking on responsibilities for the university's international exchange. He has exhibited internationally, including at the Vilnius Academy of Arts in Lithuania (2018).

His early body of work consisted of large monochrome copperplate prints built from abstract shapes. After participating in artist-in-residence programmes both in Japan and overseas — including on Awaji Island (Nagasawa Art Park) and in Thailand, and through extended work in Hokkaido — 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 series rooted in the named places he has visited and worked, with his visual vocabulary moving from the abstract toward the architectural and figurative.

Takahama is one of the principals of the Ochiishi Project (落石計画), an ongoing collaborative print-and-art project based at the site of a former radio station on Cape Ochiishi, on Hokkaido's eastern Nemuro Peninsula, which he has pursued since 2008. The project anchors his practice within the Japanese site-specific contemporary-print scene that has developed around rural and regional art programmes such as Echigo-Tsumari and the Setouchi Triennale, and the residency-driven initiatives that characterise post-2000 Japanese contemporary art.

Alongside his teaching, exhibitions, and Ochiishi work, Takahama has been a participant in numerous Japanese and international print exhibitions and is a long-standing presence in the Tokyo print community. His prints are held in public and institutional print collections in Japan and abroad.

Within the contemporary Japanese print scene Takahama is a representative figure of long-form copperplate practice — an artist for whom the etching plate is less a vehicle for image production than 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.