¡Diache!: Work by the Juried Open Portfolio Award Winners

Taro Takizawa

About the Artist

Taro Takizawa is an artist specializing in printmaking, wall vinyl installations, drawings, and 2D designs. His work blends both Western and Eastern aesthetics, with a deep appreciation for traditional printmaking processes and the art of mark-making. Takizawa is fascinated by the fusion of contemporary studio practices with traditional methods, exploring the boundaries between printmaking and installation art.

He earned his BFA with a printmaking emphasis from Central Michigan University and completed his MFA in printmaking at Syracuse University. Takizawa has exhibited his work both nationally and internationally, such as the Grand Rapids Public Museum, LUX Center for the Arts, the China Printmaking Museum, Tyger Tyger Gallery, and Kai Lin Art in Atlanta, GA. He has also participated in several artist residencies, including those at the Saltonstall Foundation for the Arts, Morgan Conservatory, GoggleWorks, and Lawrence Arts Center.

Takizawa currently serves as the Assistant Professor of Art at the University of North Carolina (UNC) Wilmington.

Artist Statement

My work is an intuitive process of making patterns by drawing, painting, carving, cutting, and printing. I am constantly mentally engaged with how I want to move. I look for formal reactions, ideas between the contemporary and personal history, perspective, thought, Japanese heritage, and permanent memory.

My work is about my fascination with water, its ripples, and its reflections. I am recreating my emotional reactions to how water seems to flow freely and continuously, by using recursive printmaking processes and mark-making techniques to imitate that movement. 

The patterns on the installation works and prints are forever repeating patterns in my head. And the process of creating these images is also a forever-repeating process of drawing, cutting, carving, and printing.

 

Artist:

Taro Takizawa
Photo of artist Sok Song

Social media: @tarotakizawart

Exhibition

¡Diache!: Work by the Juried Open Portfolio Award Winners

This collagraph monoprint of an American army uniform, adorned with patches of both Korean and U.S. flags, serves as a poignant reflection on identity and the visible traces of American influence on South Korea’s history. It also speaks to my own experience growing up as a first-generation, gay Korean immigrant.

Your Mossy Apartment
Relief print
16″ x 13” image size
2021

This print reveals a layered composition of undergarments—an intimate counterpoint to the visible uniform. Through graphite transfers and pressure printing, the work exposes the concealed labor and vulnerability beneath the surface of military presentation. Referencing the hidden layers of identity, gender, and desire, it reflects the internal contradictions of growing up queer within hypermasculine, militarized environments.

Mid Morning Green
Relief print
17″ x 24” image size
2021

Referencing the Korean baek-il (백일) celebration held 100 days after a boy’s birth, this print explores the cultural weight placed on children to fulfill family hopes and carry on legacy. The image of a ceremonial hanbok and symbolic objects evokes the traditional practice of choosing a child’s future profession—now viewed through the lens of personal anxiety, projection, and intergenerational pressure.

Signs in the Sky
Relief print
17″ x 14” image size
2023

Rooted in the imagery of traditional Korean hanbok worn by girls, this work reimagines the archetype of the "princess" not as delicate or ornamental, but as powerful. The piece speaks to the social expectations placed on young girls in a patriarchal, male-preferred society, offering a critical yet tender reflection on beauty, duty, and self-determination.

Ryoanji II
Relief print
17″ x 24” image size
2025

This sculptural installation uses layers of translucent dry-cleaning plastic imprinted with graphite to create ghostlike forms of uniforms, echoes of militarism, and the residual presence of memory. Referencing the artist’s childhood in a Korean-American dry-cleaning business, the piece intertwines personal history with broader questions of valor, sacrifice, and the overlooked labor behind symbolic cleanliness and national pride.

View from the window seat
Relief print
17″ x 14” image size
2024

This print features a miniature doll-sized military uniform suspended in a dreamlike void. Set against a backdrop of ink-stained balloon explosions, it evokes a surreal battlefield where innocence, violence, and nostalgia intermingle. The disembodied figure hovers—caught between weightlessness and detonation, suggesting the emotional dissociation of growing up under the shadow of war.

Evenfall
Relief print
17″ x 14” image size
2025

Using exploded latex balloons as printing plates, this work captures the fragmented aftermath of destruction. Compressed in the darkness of the press, the inflated forms collapse into ruptured shapes—symbolizing the transformation of air into force, breath into violence. The result is a metaphorical topography marked by war, trauma, and loss.

Half Moon Sunset
Relief print
17″ x 14” image size
2023

This print captures the invisible yet mounting pressures of war through the use of folded latex balloons as a matrix. As the forms explode under compression, ink is pushed outward—leaving behind magnified traces that resemble impact craters, shrapnel, or bursts. The resulting image becomes a symbolic battlefield, where material rupture echoes psychological fracture. The folds, the pressure, and the stains collectively visualize the unseen force of trauma and its imprint on both body and memory.

Old news
Relief print
17″ x 14” image size
2024