NAOHIKO KURIYAKI is a Japanese artist whose practice explores the idea of the “pre-painterly” — a return not beyond painting, but toward something before it. Drawing inspiration from cave paintings, icons, and traditional Japanese painting, he creates large-scale works characterized by model-free figurative drawing, reverse perspective, and the fusion of drawing and writing. Using materials such as crayons, colored pencils, markers, and tempera, KURIYAKI develops dense visual fields that move between realism and abstraction, ancient imagery and contemporary sensibility, outsider intensity and institutional art discourse.

He graduated from the Design Strategy program at Kyushu University’s Graduate School of Design. His recent exhibitions include the “21st Century Art Borderless Exhibition” at The National Art Center, Tokyo, and

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