Toshinao Yoshioka

Toshinao Yoshioka (born 1972, Kyoto) is a Japanese printmaker and Associate Professor in the Printmaking Department of Kyoto City University of Arts (KCUA). His practice has consistently positioned silkscreen and lithography against contemporary digital imaging — using laser-engraved limestone, photogrammetry-based prints on rubber substrates, and large layered installations to challenge what he describes as the "flat view of things" that contemporary digital culture habitually accepts.

Yoshioka graduated with a B.F.A. from KCUA in 1994 and completed his master's degree in printmaking there in 1996. He served as Lecturer at Nagoya University of Art and Design starting in 1999, then as Associate Professor at Nagoya Zokei University from 2005 through 2013, before returning to his alma mater as Associate Professor at KCUA in 2014. The career trajectory — Kyoto education, regional Aichi teaching, return to Kyoto — places him centrally in the Kansai-area academic printmaking network.

His early competition record was unusually strong: in 1997, the year he completed his master's, he received the Special Jury Prize at the International Print Triennial in Krakow and the Silver Prize at the Japan Visual Art Exhibition '95 (presented in 1995). In 1999 he received the Fourth Prize at the Kochi International Triennial Exhibition of Print, and in 2020 returned to that competition for an Honorable Mention at the 11th edition. Recent exhibitions through Gallery OUT of PLACE in Tokyo have presented his Plastic Scenes series (2021), his Half-blind Alien project (2021), and earlier Release / Vestiges / Understanding / Bottom / Image silkscreen-on-rubber works from the late 2010s.

Yoshioka's signature technical innovation is a laser-driven lithographic process: he applies Arabic gum solution to limestone, allows it to dry, then uses a computer-controlled laser to burn through the dried gum surface — producing image areas exposed to the stone beneath, which then accept the standard lithographic ink. The technique extends limestone-based printmaking into digital authorship without converting it into ordinary computer printing. In parallel he prints silkscreen on rubber sheets, treating the resilient rubber substrate as a way to give material weight to immaterial digital data — "materializing the immaterial existence of data," in his own descriptive language.

His work has been featured in the influential 2013 exhibition Redefining the Multiple: Thirteen Japanese Printmakers (Bates College, Maine; University of Tennessee Knoxville; Rochester Contemporary), which presented him alongside Hideki Kimura, Saori Miyake, Kouseki Ono, and others as part of the leading contemporary Japanese cohort. Group exhibitions have also taken him to the University of Tennessee Ewing Gallery and Villa Romana (Florence), among other international venues.

Yoshioka's prints are held by the Krakow National Museum (Poland), the Machida City Museum of Graphic Arts (Tokyo), the Guangdong Museum of Art (China), the Museum of Modern Art Ibaraki, and the Kyoto Municipal Museum of Art. Within KCUA he leads the silkscreen direction of the printmaking department, complementing Eiko Tanaka's lithography role and the legacy of Hideki Kimura's monotype practice. His teaching and curatorial work also include service as a member of MAXI GRAPHICA, the printmakers' group founded by Kimura.