Yuko Kimura

Yuko Kimura is a contemporary printmaker and paper artist whose work explores the Japanese aesthetic concept of wabi-sabi through the transformation of found and handmade papers. Born in Oakland, California in 1968 to Japanese parents, she was raised in Tokyo, where her artistic sensibility was shaped by early experiences with traditional materials. As a child, her mother would ask her to repair the family's shoji screens with gampi, a type of strong handmade paper, instilling in her an intimate understanding of paper as both functional material and aesthetic object.

Kimura returned to the United States in 1989 and pursued formal art education, earning her BFA from the Cleveland Institute of Art in 1994 and her MFA from the University of Michigan School of Art and Design in 1997. Her technical practice encompasses etching, aquatint, monotype, and paper collage, but what distinguishes her work is her incorporation of found materials, particularly woodblock-printed pages from antique Japanese books that have been eaten away by mushi, the small worms that consume mulberry fiber. These worm-eaten pages, with their delicate lacework of absence, become central elements in compositions that meditate on impermanence, memory, and the beauty of decay.

Kimura's process is deeply material. She makes her own mulberry paper from raw bark fiber, pleats and twists sheets to create dimensional surfaces, and layers etched marks with indigo dye and fragments of old cloth obtained from her grandmother in Japan. The resulting works, whether intimate artist books or large-scale installations, possess a luminous quality that emerges from the translucency of layered paper and the interplay between printed mark and material texture. Her Tsugi Hagi series references the Japanese textile tradition of patching, while her Mushikui works take their name from the worm-eaten paper that serves as both subject and medium.

From 2021 through 2026, Kimura's work was featured in 'Washi Transformed: New Expressions in Japanese Paper,' a traveling museum exhibition curated by Meher McArthur that showcased nine contemporary Japanese artists working with washi. The exhibition visited approximately fifteen museums across the United States, including the San Diego Museum of Art, the Palmer Museum at Penn State, the Dayton Art Institute, and the Morikami Museum. Her work is held in the permanent collections of the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Canton Museum of Art, the Minneapolis Institute of Art, the Morikami Museum, and the Cleveland Clinic, and she is represented by the Verne Collection.