The philosophy of printmaking is a patchwork of minor narratives in the broader context of fine art and aesthetics, often overshadowed by dominant artistic discourses. A recurring preoccupation in discussions of print media is the question of origin and copy, often articulated through Walter Benjamin’s concept of aura in The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction
[1]. This essay is often misattributed as foundational to print culture despite its focus on cinema. Origins and copies, however, become oppositions that carry implicit hierarchies reminiscent of familiar binaries: Eve as the copy of Adam’s rib, Yin as the moon’s reflection of the Yang sunlight. Instead of binary operations, my work resists these structures, seeking forms of replication that do not subordinate one to another.
The notion of replica has further resonance for me. For six years, I worked as an assistant to master ukiyo-e woodblock carver Motoharu Asaka, whose practice—like many of his generation—centered on producing meticulous hand-carved and hand-printed replica ukiyo-e. This experience led me to question what a replica is, beyond that old story of origins and copies. Unlike copies, which imply mere duplication, replicas inhabit a different space: uncannily familiar yet displaced in time and context, perhaps like 21st-century Edo prints made by artisans who love karaoke and beer.
In my 2022 fieldwork
[2], together with Agustín Spinetto, I extended this metaphor of replica as a way to consider experiences of migration. We researched the textures, objects, and sonic environments that women—who immigrated to rural and semi-rural Japan decades ago—had carried with them and still lived among. Their stories were certainly not those of forced migration nor any grand narrative of exile, but neither were their stories of transnational movement straightforward. Their intersectional gendered experiences of socioeconomic conditions, race, faith, and international movement created complex dynamics that are rendered largely invisible in traditional academic scholarship. By collaboratively recreating the sensory elements of their multi-intra-regional senses of place through silkscreen prints, ceramics, and field recordings, we explored how migration is not merely a change of location but a process of replication: a life rebuilt elsewhere, echoing a past phase but entirely reconstituted through new materialities.
For the final exhibition accompanying my PhD defense, I intended to develop this working method further with the hybrid theoretical-empirical approaches of Benedict Anderson
[3], Partha Chatterjee
[4], and Christopher Pinney
[5], who all interrogate the role of print culture in shaping and synchronising imagined communities. Here, print culture is theorised as historically enabling a synchronic consciousness, foundational for national belonging. Today, as digital fabrication technologies expand the parameters of printmaking beyond its 20th-century fine art framing as an adjunct to painting, I argue that post-digital fabrication—as a process of virtual-material translation—performs, reveals and enables new forms of transnational fluidity—an (un)belonging to non-linear geographies. In a world of increasingly cross-border lives, where aging immigrant women in Japan face compounded marginalisations, print’s expanded field holds theoretical potential to reframe questions of belonging and unbelonging. As a medium inherently tied to transfer (migration and space) and virtuality (indeterminacy and time), print can articulate forms of itinerant community beyond the nation-state model.
The final work presented in the thesis-exhibition, developed the methods of replica set out in the Liminal Towns case study and fieldwork. It is a replica of a Brighton bus stop, originally located by the ocean and its proportions slightly adjusted to adhere to the tatami-sized construction modules used as standard building practice in Japan, where I have lived for almost half my life.
At its base, the fragmented toes of a missing monument from the Geidai university campus signal a patina-colored landscape that evokes both locations simultaneously. This intersection of sites is refracted through both sensory experience and memory as a quantum entanglement of (un)belonging, which further resonates with Karen Barad's concept of material discursivity
[6]. Barad’s work enacts a quantum take on Foucault’s “What is an Author," where it is not only meaning that deconstructs but material itself fragmenting, sedimenting, and re-emerging in uneven and improbable ways.
Installed at the entrance to the exhibition, near Yoshioka Tokujin’s contemplative benches, the quantum replica bus stop serves as a temporary resting place for those in transit—spatially, temporally, or conceptually.
On closer approach, it reveals itself as entirely composed of paper pulp—the material of printmakers—this materiality also endeavours to perform the ecologies of print culture that stretches back through Japan’s history of coordinated networks of papermakers, printers, and publishers. Though highly analogue and handmade in appearance, its forms were shaped through digital processes: 3D data was translated through CNC machines and 3D printing to generate polystyrene and resin molds, into which the pulp was sprayed and pressed.
This project emerges from the still-forming discipline of artistic research, which traces its history to the near-simultaneous implementation of PhD programs in the UK and Japan in the 1980s, later gaining significant institutional foothold following Documenta 2012’s emphasis on artistic research. Despite its increasing presence in European, Oceanian, and Northeast Asian academies, artistic research continues to grapple with its academic legitimacy. My approach maintains a critical stance toward the discipline, pushing at its edges—not using artistic research as a method of explanation but as a material intervention that reveals complexities often flattened or overlooked by empirical and text-based traditions.