Eiko Tanaka

Eiko Tanaka (born 1969 in 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 earned her master's degree in printmaking at KCUA in 1995 and completed the university's doctoral program in printmaking in 2009, placing her career trajectory firmly 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. She has held solo exhibitions at Art Front Gallery in Tokyo in 2007 and 2013, among the venues where she has developed this working vocabulary.

Her career is built on a sustained run of competition successes. In 1994 she took the Excellent Prize at the 10th Contemporary Print Competition at the Osaka Prefectural Center for Contemporary Art, and in 2000 she won Grand Prizes at both the 13th Contemporary Print Competition at that same center and the 8th Hamamatsu print competition. She received the Kirin Art Award Encouragement Prize in 2002 and, in 2018, the Second Prize at the First International Biennale of Lithography in Belgrade, Serbia. Together these honors established her as one of the more visible stone-lithographers of her generation in Japan.

Her 2003 Sakuya Konohana Award from Osaka City recognized her contribution to lithographic practice in the Kansai region. She has continued to show in solo and group exhibitions in Japan and abroad — including Matsuo Megumi + Voice Gallery in Kyoto and Gallery LaPaix in Nagoya — and her ongoing Stone Letter Project (2017–) extends 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 teachers of stone lithography in Japan, and her teaching has helped shape successive generations of KCUA-trained lithographers.

Within contemporary Japanese printmaking Tanaka represents a sustained, decades-long commitment to stone-lithographic practice, an output of restrained still-life and landscape imagery, and a teaching role at the heart of KCUA's printmaking program. Her work is held in public collections including the Osaka Prefectural collection (formerly the Osaka Prefectural Center for Contemporary Art), the Machida City Museum of Graphic Arts, the Hamamatsu Museum of Art, and KCUA's art archives.