Litzco Yamamiya

Litzco Yamamiya (born 1958, Yamanashi Prefecture) is a Japanese intaglio printmaker working in Tokyo who has, over more than two decades, developed a sustained body of copperplate etchings combining several traditional intaglio techniques — aquatint, line etching, lift-ground, soft-ground, and chine-collé — into compositions that read as quiet, atmospheric meditations on space, color, and small architectural objects. Her surname is rendered in romaji as Litzco; the corresponding kanji is 律子.

Yamamiya trained at the Zabo House (Hangaprint and Painting Workshop ザボハウス) in Tokyo, the longstanding Tokyo printmaking studio that has been the principal institutional home for working intaglio artists in the city since the late 1990s. The Zabo House lineage runs through several of the most active contemporary Japanese intaglio printmakers, and Yamamiya's practice is part of that workshop tradition: a sustained engagement with the copperplate, an emphasis on technically layered editions, and a working pace that produces a small number of finished plates per year.

Her early prints engaged the chair as motif. The 2004 etching 'Chair 2004 — L Chair' was selected for the College Women's Association of Japan (CWAJ) Print Show and entered the Library of Congress's CWAJ Print Show Collection — the principal U.S.-public-collection record of contemporary Japanese print activity. The chair sits framed within an interior space, the etched line economical, the aquatint deepening shadow into a unified middle-grey ground.

Her recent practice has shifted from the chair to landscape and cosmic themes. The 2024 print 'Cosmic Mountain' (49 × 47 cm) — selected for the 68th CWAJ Print Show in 2025 — uses aquatint, etching, lift-ground etching, soft-ground etching, and chine-collé in a single composition. The combination of these intaglio techniques allows for a richly layered tonal field; chine-collé, in which a thin sheet of toned paper is laminated to the printed sheet, gives the surface a subtle warm cast against the cooler etched line.

In December 2024 she held a solo exhibition at Ginza Itoya K.Itoya B1, and in October 2024 she participated in the group show 'Hangaprint Forest (版画森)' at Gallery noir/NOKTA in Izunokuni City, Shizuoka Prefecture. She is a sustained presence in the Tokyo print community through these gallery channels and through CWAJ Print Show selection, alongside her active Instagram presence (@litzco.y) where she shares process documentation alongside finished editions.

Yamamiya is one of a number of contemporary Tokyo-area intaglio printmakers who emerged through the Zabo House workshop and whose prints have been sustained over time through the CWAJ Print Show channel. Her technical commitment to combining four or five intaglio techniques on a single plate — distinctive within the contemporary Japanese print field, where most artists settle on one or two — has produced a body of work that tracks the long evolution of Japanese intaglio practice from the late twentieth century to the present.