Tomoko Ueno

Tomoko Ueno (born 1961, Saitama Prefecture) is a Japanese lithographer based in Saitama whose practice combines traditional Japanese-paper substrates with European-derived planographic technique to depict landscape subjects connected to water and natural environments. She is a member of the Japan Print Association (日本版画協会) and the CAF Nebula Association (CAFネビュラ協会), and her work has been featured in exhibitions at the Kochi Prefectural Museum of Art. Her selection for the 68th CWAJ Print Show 2025 marks a current institutional placement of her work.

Ueno's biographical trajectory is unusual within the contemporary Japanese print scene: she lived in Kochi Prefecture from 1985 to 2011 and participated in Kochi-area ceramic workshops during that period, completed studies in Spanish at Mexico's Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM), and graduated from the correspondence program at Musashino Art University in 2001. In 2007 she taught lithography at the Kochi Prefectural Museum of Art. The combination of late entry to formal art education, a long Kochi residency with ceramic-craft training, and a Mexican Spanish-language detour distinguishes her from the standard Tokyo / Kyoto / Osaka print-graduate path.

The mature lithography practice — anchored in Saitama since 2011 — produces work in the 100 x 76 cm range using both traditional Japanese paper and European print papers as substrates. The 2024 work 'The Road of Water' (湧水に行く道, 100 x 76 cm) — selected for the 68th CWAJ Print Show 2025 with print number 185 — is representative: a vertical lithograph depicting a path leading toward a freshwater spring, with the painterly brush-stroke quality of Japanese ink painting carried into the lithographic surface. Reviewers have described her work as having 'a strong sense of brush stroke in its painterly style,' positioning it at the boundary between European lithography and Japanese ink painting.

Ueno's exhibition history is concentrated at small Tokyo galleries (notably O Gallery UP-S in Ginza, with multiple recurring solo shows) and at Gallery AO in Kobe. Her membership in CAF Nebula — a long-running group of artists associated with the Contemporary Art Foundation network — and the Japan Print Association situates her within the senior end of the contemporary Japanese print scene, with active CWAJ participation extending her reach to international collectors. The single CWAJ-2025 image is the principal currently-circulating documentation of her work; further images are available through her O Gallery UP-S exhibition catalogues and through the Kochi-area print archive but were not surfaced through English-language WebFetch.