Kurumi Wakaki

Kurumi Wakaki (born 1985, Hokkaido) is a Japanese printmaker whose performance-inflected practice combines traditional intaglio and frottage techniques with money, food, and the artist's own body as printing surfaces. She graduated from Kyoto City University of Arts (KCUA) with a B.F.A. in Printmaking in 2008 and continues to live and work in Kyoto, where she has built a sustained reputation as one of the most distinctive performance-print figures of her generation.

Wakaki's central conceptual question is — in her own framing — "what can become a printing plate?" Her practice tests the question literally: she has used Japanese yen banknotes (in her well-known banknote series) as the source for printed images that probe the relationship between currency and identity; she has used her own body, including her shaved scalp, as the printing surface (the Man of the Wheel project, presented at Roppongi Art Night in 2016, used her head as a circular plate); and she has used food, household objects, and even institutional architecture as substrates and matrices. The 2008 Taro Okamoto Award for Contemporary Art recognized this body-and-currency line of work very early in her career.

A distinctive feature of her practice is its commitment to extreme productive tempo: in 2013, for the project Wakaki Kurumi no Seisaku Dojo (Kurumi Wakaki's Creative Workshop), staged at the Sakamoto Zenzō Museum of Art (Niigata Prefecture), she produced thirty separate artworks in thirty days, with the public invited to watch the process. She received the Rokko Meat Art Award in 2013 in connection with this and related projects, and the Kyoto City Art Newcomer Award in 2021. Recent solo exhibitions include Jack and the Bean Fungus — Wakaki Kurumi Woodblock Print Exhibition at Art Zone Kaguraoka (Kyoto, 2021), which extended her vocabulary of unconventional plate-materials into a fungal-organic register.

The University of Victoria research thesis The Art of Money: Wakaki Kurumi's Deconstruction of the Yen has formalized academic attention to her banknote work, treating her as one of the most theoretically significant young Japanese printmakers in the post-2008 generation. The Japigozzi Collection (Geneva), the largest private collection of contemporary Japanese art outside Japan, holds her work, and she is featured at the 4th PATinKyoto Print Art Triennale (2025) at the Kyocera Museum of Art Kyoto.

Her recent project Printmaking Path (版画道, 2023), a 10,000 × 10,000 mm frottage on Japanese paper, took the spatial scale of printmaking to room-sized dimensions — pressing the printing-plate question into the architecture of the exhibition site itself. The work was recommended for PATinKyoto by Aoki Kanae, curator at the Wakayama Prefectural Museum of Modern Art.

Wakaki is one of a small handful of younger Japanese printmakers whose work has been collected outside the standard print circuits — by contemporary art collectors (Japigozzi, Takahashi) rather than print specialists — and who treats printmaking as a performance and conceptual practice rather than as an editioned-print discipline. Her output combines a traditional Kyoto print-school education with a deeply unorthodox approach to plate-making that has attracted both academic and commercial attention.