Biography
Rin Takahashi (born 1996, Tokyo) is a Japanese contemporary artist whose practice spans drawing, objects, video, installation, and performance, organised around an ongoing project titled "Emaki" (絵巻) — a sequence of small daily drawings (210 x 297 mm) on paper using pencil and pen. She was selected in 2025 for the 4th PATinKyoto Print Art Triennale on the recommendation of Chiba Machiko, a curator at the Toyota Municipal Museum of Art, and is best understood as an "expanded printmaking" artist rather than a conventional printmaker working in a single intaglio or relief technique.
The Emaki project, ongoing since 2017, treats daily drawing as a rhythmic, accumulative practice: small sheets are produced regularly, each carrying a discrete cluster of recurring iconic figures and motifs, with specific paint colours assigned to particular subjects. The project also serves as a substrate for her wider gallery practice, with objects, videos, and installations frequently incorporating elements first developed on the small drawings. The PATinKyoto recommender frames the practice as embodying printmaking's essential characteristics — repetition, multiplicity, and mediality — even though the work itself is hand-drawn rather than printed.
Takahashi completed her MFA in Global Art Practice at the Graduate School of Fine Arts, Tokyo University of the Arts (Tokyo Geijutsu Daigaku, Geidai), in 2023. Prior to that, in 2022, she participated in "Adventure Something" at the École nationale supérieure de paysage in France, an immersive study-abroad project at one of France's principal landscape-architecture schools.
Her exhibition history includes "The Yebisu International Festival for Art & Alternative Visions 2024" at the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography (2024), "Blind Dog" at Art Lab Aichi (2023), and inclusion in the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo (MOT) 30th-anniversary exhibition "Choreographies of the Everyday" (2025). The 4th PATinKyoto ran April 15 – May 11, 2025, at the Kyoto City KYOCERA Museum of Art.
Takahashi sits within the post-Geidai cohort of younger Japanese artists for whom the boundary between drawing, printmaking, video, and performance is intentionally porous, and for whom the print triennial has functioned as a sympathetic exhibition platform. Her work is documented through her artist website (rintakahashi.studio.site). Her PATinKyoto-selected work is a sample drawing from "Emaki," representative of the larger ongoing project rather than a single editioned print.
Key Facts
- Active Period
- 1996
- Nationality
- 🇯🇵Japan
- Movement
- Contemporary Mokuhanga
- Works Indexed
- 1
Frequently Asked Questions
Rin Takahashi (born 1996, Tokyo) is a Japanese contemporary artist whose practice spans drawing, objects, video, installation, and performance, organised around an ongoing project titled "Emaki" (絵巻) — a sequence of small daily drawings (210 x 297 mm) on paper using pencil and pen. She was selected in 2025 for the 4th PATinKyoto Print Art Triennale on the recommendation of Chiba Machiko, a curator at the Toyota Municipal Museum of Art, and is best understood as an "expanded printmaking" artist rather than a conventional printmaker working in a single intaglio or relief technique.
Rin Takahashi was active born in 1996. They were associated with the Contemporary Mokuhanga movement.
Rin Takahashi'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.