Biography
Rin Takahashi (born 1996, Tokyo) is a Japanese contemporary artist whose practice spans drawing, sculpture, 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 is included in batch-06 on the strength of her 2025 selection for the 4th PATinKyoto Print Art Triennale, where she is recommended by Toyota Municipal Museum of Art curator Chiba Machiko, 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 assigned specific paint colours. The project has functioned as a medium for collaboration with other artists — Takahashi invites collaborators to draw on existing Emaki sheets, layering new images over previously created ones — and as a substrate for her gallery practice, with sculptures, 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 Tokyo University of the Arts (Tokyo Geijutsu Daigaku, Geidai) Graduate School of Fine Arts 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. The European study experience is reflected in subsequent works that braid French and Japanese visual references.
Her exhibition history includes 'The Yebisu International Festival for Art & Alternative Visions 2024 — 30 Ways to Go to the Moon' 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' (September 2025). The 4th PATinKyoto runs 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 the artist's website (rintakahashi.studio.site) and the Instagram handle @rrrinin. Her PATinKyoto-selected work is the sample drawing '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, sculpture, 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 is included in batch-06 on the strength of her 2025 selection for the 4th PATinKyoto Print Art Triennale, where she is recommended by Toyota Municipal Museum of Art curator Chiba Machiko, 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.