Marie Yoshiki

Marie Yoshiki (born 1982, Kagoshima) is a Japanese silkscreen artist who has spent the past decade and a half pushing screenprinting away from its conventional graphic flatness and toward sculpture. She prints layer upon layer of silkscreen ink — sometimes pulling the squeegee hundreds of times — until the dried film of pigment thickens into a distinct physical body sitting proud of the substrate, and the printed image becomes a low-relief object that registers as much by touch as by sight.

Yoshiki was educated entirely in Kyoto. She graduated from the printmaking course in the Faculty of Art at Kyoto Seika University in 2006, then completed an M.A. at the Graduate School of Arts at Kyoto City University of Arts in 2008. After graduate school she remained in Kyoto, joining the printmaking faculty at Kyoto Seika and continuing to develop the multi-layered silkscreen practice she had begun in graduate school. Her studio output divides between unique low-relief objects pulled on acrylic panels or mesh frames and editioned silkscreens in the more conventional sense.

The heart of her practice is the slow accumulation of ink. Where a typical silkscreen edition involves a small number of well-registered pulls, Yoshiki returns the squeegee across the same image dozens or even hundreds of times, building up a printed deposit thick enough to become a tactile object in its own right. The resulting works hover between print and sculpture; the lace, fabric, and seasonal-foliage motifs she favors are not merely depicted on a plane but precipitated as material into space. She has described the process as one she discovered through studio experimentation rather than from any prior model in Japanese silkscreen, and it has come to define her recognizable signature.

Key solo exhibitions include Precipitation at Nagi Museum of Contemporary Art in Okayama (2019), which gave the multi-layer technique its working name; decoration inside: fond de robe at Wacoal Study Hall Kyoto (2020); and Precipitation at the Omuro Museum in Mie (2021). She was selected for VOCA: The Vision of Contemporary Art 2016 at the Ueno Royal Museum in Tokyo, one of Japan's most-watched showcases for emerging contemporary artists, and was included in the 13-artist survey Redefining the Multiple: 13 Japanese Printmakers at the Bates College Museum of Art in Maine (2013) — a major U.S. exhibition of contemporary Japanese print.

In 2022 her permanent installation Precipitation of Light entered the Echigo-Tsumari Art Field, the world's largest outdoor art triennial, located in the rural Tokamachi region of Niigata Prefecture. Sited in the village of Higashi Karekimata, the work uses silkscreen layering to render the changing seasons of the surrounding rice country and forest, foregrounding the tactile memory of place. It remains one of the longest-form expressions of her layered-ink technique and is catalogued by Echigo-Tsumari as work T401.

Yoshiki is one of seventeen artists in the 4th PATinKyoto Print Art Triennale 2025, recommended by Emiko Yoshioka, curator and professor at Kyoto Seika University. Her work Lace#21 (2012, silk-screen and acrylic panel, 590 × 490 mm) is among the recurring featured pieces in PATinKyoto exhibition documentation. Alongside her exhibitions she co-runs an artist collective using risograph technology to publish zines and artist books, an extension of her commitment to keeping the boundaries of printmaking open. She maintains an active online presence at yoshikimarie.com.