Biography
Toshinao Yoshioka (born 1972, Kyoto) is a Japanese printmaker who teaches in the Printmaking Department of Kyoto City University of Arts (KCUA), where he specializes in silkscreen. His practice sets traditional print media against contemporary digital imaging, using photogrammetry and screenprinting to give physical, material weight to what would otherwise remain immaterial digital data.
Yoshioka earned his B.F.A. and completed his M.F.A. in printmaking at KCUA in the mid-1990s. He went on to teach as a lecturer at Nagoya University of Art and Design from 1999 and as an associate professor at Nagoya Zokei University in Aichi until 2013, before joining the printmaking faculty at his alma mater, KCUA, in 2014. The trajectory — Kyoto education, regional Aichi teaching, and a return to Kyoto — places him centrally in the Kansai-area academic printmaking network.
His competition record began early. In 1995 he received the Silver Prize at the Japan Visual Art Exhibition '95, and in 1997 the Special Prize at the International Print Triennial in Kraków, Poland. He took the Fourth Prize at the Kochi International Triennial Exhibition of Print in 1999 and returned to that competition two decades later for an Honorable Mention at its eleventh edition in 2020.
Yoshioka's signature material is rubber. Working from photogrammetric image data, he screenprints onto rubber sheets, treating the resilient substrate and the thick, built-up silkscreen ink as a means, in his own words, to 'materialize the immaterial existence of data.' Recent solo and two-person exhibitions at Gallery OUT of PLACE in Tokyo have presented his Plastic Scenes (2018) and Half-blind Alien (2021) projects.
His work has traveled internationally. He was included in the touring exhibition Redefining the Multiple: Thirteen Japanese Printmakers, shown at the University of Tennessee's Ewing Gallery, and in the exhibition Talking Rocks at the Villa Romana in Florence. He is also a member of the Kyoto-based printmakers' group MAXI GRAPHICA.
Yoshioka's prints are held in public collections including the Krakow National Museum in Poland, the Machida City Museum of Graphic Arts in Tokyo, and the Guangdong Museum of Art in China.
Key Facts
- Active Period
- 1972
- Nationality
- 🇯🇵Japan
- Movement
- Contemporary Mokuhanga
- Subjects
- Silkscreen
- Works Indexed
- 5
Frequently Asked Questions
Toshinao Yoshioka (born 1972, Kyoto) is a Japanese printmaker who teaches in the Printmaking Department of Kyoto City University of Arts (KCUA), where he specializes in silkscreen. His practice sets traditional print media against contemporary digital imaging, using photogrammetry and screenprinting to give physical, material weight to what would otherwise remain immaterial digital data.
Toshinao Yoshioka was active born in 1972. They were associated with the Contemporary Mokuhanga movement.
Toshinao Yoshioka'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.
Toshinao Yoshioka's prints frequently feature silkscreen.
