Eiko Tanaka

Eiko Tanaka (born 1969, Osaka) is a Japanese lithographer and Professor in the Printmaking Department of Kyoto City University of Arts (KCUA), where she teaches stone lithography and painting. She graduated from KCUA's Faculty of Fine Arts with a major in printmaking in 1993, completed her master's degree at KCUA in 1995, and finished her doctoral coursework (PhD program) at the same institution in 2009 — placing her career trajectory entirely within the Kyoto-based lithographic lineage.

Tanaka's mature work commits to stone lithography in a deliberately low-key, almost monochromatic register. Her output across the 2000s and 2010s combines large stone-printed surfaces with a quiet figurative imagery — landscapes, isolated still-life objects, fragmentary architectural views — that reads as descended from European post-war lithography rather than from the dominant Japanese mokuhanga tradition. Her solo exhibitions at Art Front Gallery (Tokyo) — including into the forest (2007) and still life (2013) — established the working vocabulary she has continued to develop since.

Her early career is built on a sustained run of competition successes: the Excellent Prize at the 10th Contemporary Print Competition at the Osaka Prefectural Center for Contemporary Art in 1994, the Grand Prize at the 5th International Plastic Competition in 2000, the Grand Prize at the Osaka Triennial Print exhibition (2000), and the Second Prize at the First International Biennale of Lithography in Serbia. These honors, all coming within her first decade out of graduate school, situated her quickly as one of the more visible stone-lithographers of her generation in Japan.

Tanaka's 2003 Sakuya-Kono-Hana Award (Osaka City) recognized her sustained contribution to lithographic practice in the Kansai region. Subsequent solo and two-person exhibitions have taken place at Gallery Blank-A (Nagoya), Gallery TRI-ANGLE (Takarazuka University), and Art Front Gallery, with her ongoing series Stone letter project — letter from a stone (2017–) extending the literal materiality of lithography into a long-running multi-venue project that treats the limestone matrix itself as a corresponding medium.

Her faculty appointment at KCUA places her among the senior lithographic teachers in Japan. The KCUA printmaking department also includes silkscreen specialist Toshinao Yoshioka, painter-printmaker Hideki Kimura (Professor Emeritus), and others — together the department represents the strongest concentration of contemporary Japanese stone-lithography teaching outside Tokyo Geidai. Tanaka is the Lithography lead within that constellation.

Within contemporary Japanese printmaking Tanaka represents the institutional center of stone-print-based practice: a sustained commitment to lithography over three decades, an output of restrained still-life and landscape imagery, and a teaching role that has shaped successive generations of KCUA-trained lithographers. Her work is held in the Osaka Prefectural Center for Contemporary Art and in private collections in the Kansai region, and continues to circulate through CWAJ Print Show and Japan Print Association group exhibitions in Tokyo.