Philosophy — 余白, yohaku: the blank that remains
What is left out
speaks loudest.
Four principles, learned slowly. Listed quickly.
Subtract until it objects
Begin with everything the client wants.Remove a third. Live with it a week.Remove a third again.The work will say, plainly, when one cut was too many —put that one back, and stop.
Listen to the paper
Materials are not surfaces; they are instructions.Kozo wants to be touched. Concrete wants distance.A brand printed on the wrong stock is a sentencespoken in the wrong tone of voice.
Slowness is a structure
The studio takes twelve projects a year.Not because twelve is enough money —because thirteen is too little silence.
The viewer finishes the work
A poster that explains itself completely is furniture.Leave a gap the width of a question,and the viewer will cross it —and on the far side, the work becomes theirs.
The hands behind the margin
Aiko Murakami trained as a printmaker before she ever owned a computer, and it shows: every identity is still proofed on paper before a screen is allowed an opinion. After eight years at a Tokyo branding firm — where she was, by her own account, very good at adding things — she moved to Kyoto in 2016 and opened a studio with two desks and deliberately empty walls.
The studio is small on purpose. Growth, here, is measured in what each project no longer needs.
- Born
- Kanazawa, 1987
- Trained
- Kyoto City University of Arts — printmaking, 2010
- Studio founded
- A former kimono workshop, Higashiyama, 2016
- Staff
- Two people, one cat (Hōji, head of naps)
- Clients
- Paper mills, museums, tea blenders, one shrine
Teachers, in absentia
- The tea room at a Daitoku-ji sub-temple, visited weekly for nine years.
- A grandmother’s sewing box — thread sorted by weight, never by colour.
- Winter light in Kanazawa, the only grey with thirty names.
- The Heart Sutra, hand-copied eighty-one times. Badly.
If these pages feel like very little — they are working.