Biography
Wang Muyi (王木易) is a Chinese-born printmaker based in Kyoto, Japan. He was born in 1989 in Wuxi, China, and moved with his family to Nagoya, Japan, as a young child. He completed his entire higher education at Tokyo University of the Arts (Tokyo Geidai), earning a BFA in Oil Painting (2013) before turning to printmaking for an MFA in Printmaking (2016) and a PhD in Printmaking (2020). He works primarily in relief and woodblock printing, using water-based inks on washi paper.
In 2019 Wang was among the artists selected for Publish or Perish!, the Tokyo University of the Arts presentation at Graphica Creativa — the Finnish Graphic Triennial — produced by the Jyväskylä Art Museum in Finland. The presentation gathered faculty and students of the Geidai Printmaking Department, among them Nao Osada, Kazuki Sakai, Saki Miyashita, Tomohiro Kubota, Sosuke Ueta, Gouki Ota, Kanami Hanno, Kanako Tanuma, Kei Yamazaki and Hong Ge; a detail of Gouki Ota's Five Politicians was used as the exhibition's main image.
The Geidai Printmaking Department was established by Komai Tetsurō, one of the leading Japanese printmakers of his generation and a central figure in postwar Japanese intaglio (copperplate) printmaking, and its research groups are today headed by professors Miida Seiichirō and Michael W. Schneider. The department once maintained separate laboratories divided by technique, though that division has since been dissolved, and its training has long combined Japanese woodblock (mokuhanga) with Western intaglio, lithography and silkscreen.
Since the early 2000s the Geidai printmaking programme has drawn substantial numbers of international students — including from China, Korea and Taiwan — into graduate-level Japanese print education, often producing cross-cultural work that fuses Japanese mokuhanga and intaglio technique with other visual traditions. Wang Muyi belongs to this cohort of mainland Chinese artists who pursued graduate printmaking training in Japan. Beyond the 2019 Graphica Creativa selection, his exhibition record includes an international invitational of water-based woodblock prints in Nanjing (2021) and group and studio exhibitions in Kyoto, Chicago and Vienna.
Key Facts
- Nationality
- 🇨🇳China
- Movement
- Contemporary Mokuhanga
- Works Indexed
- 1
Frequently Asked Questions
Wang Muyi (王木易) is a Chinese-born printmaker based in Kyoto, Japan. He was born in 1989 in Wuxi, China, and moved with his family to Nagoya, Japan, as a young child. He completed his entire higher education at Tokyo University of the Arts (Tokyo Geidai), earning a BFA in Oil Painting (2013) before turning to printmaking for an MFA in Printmaking (2016) and a PhD in Printmaking (2020). He works primarily in relief and woodblock printing, using water-based inks on washi paper.
Wang Muyi'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.