Haruna Niiya

Haruna Niiya was born in Hiroshima, Japan in 1993, where she spent her childhood camping with her family, collecting plant seeds and loving the outdoors. She shared, “one of my favorite activities was walking around the house to see what creatures were around and if there was anything new.” Niiya dabbled in sketching and oil painting before she found her true calling of printmaking while attending Tokyo Zokei University.

Today, Niiya is a silkscreen fine artist. After she finishes hand painting a piece, she partners with a renowned silkscreen studio in Tokyo. The small team of artisans perfectly replicates her work by designing multiple unique silkscreens to create layers of colors and shapes that are printed one at a time onto paper, reproducing her original at a gallery-level quality. Since each layer of color must dry before the next is applied—and the entire process is done by hand—it takes at least a month to create a series of prints.

Niiya lives with her husband, two birds and a cat in Ninomiya, a rural town in Kanagawa Prefecture where she nurtures her love for nature, one of her greatest influences. “Natural phenomena that are repeated every day can remain vivid in my mind, even though they are fleeting events,” she shared. “Through my art, I realized that many people feel it too and everyone secretly shares it. By presenting trivial events I encounter as artwork, my small discoveries become opportunities to engage with others.”