Chiyu Uemae was an original member of Japanese avant-garde postwar art group, the Gutai Art Association. Following the group's dissolution in 1972, Uemae pursued an independent practice, working across painting, sculpture, and fibre art until his death in 2018.
Read MoreKyoto-born Uemae initially studied nanga, a school of Japanese painting influenced by Chinese literati painting. He later began experimenting with oils, and first exhibited in a group show at the Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum in 1947. Uemae was not formally trained in art, and had various jobs including as an industrial labourer and a textile dyeing apprentice in Kyoto.
In 1953, Uemae began to study under the painter Jirō Yoshihara, who would lead the formation of the Gutai Art Association in 1954 in the industrial Hanshin region. Gutai's founding members included Chiyu Uemae, Shozo Shimamoto, Kazuo Shiraga, Yoshio Sekine, Tsuruko Yamazaki, and Toshio Yoshida, among others. Uemae remained an active part of Gutai for nearly two decades until its dissolution in 1972, exhibiting in every group show.
Uemae's seven-decade career reflected a prolific engagement with painting, sculpture, print, textiles and fibre. He remained committed to an enduring, focused exploration of materiality. In contrast to other members of Gutai, who prioritised innovation and alternative means of artistic expression, Uemae showed an appreciation for beauty, repetition, and automatism.
The French art critic and curator, Michel Tapié, who introduced Gutai to museums and collectors in Europe, wrote on Uemae's work after seeing his work in 1966: 'His style of painting has remained remarkably consistent and on track... Without going to excess, Uemae continues to move sure-footedly, step-by-step, along his own path'.
In the 1950s and 60s, Uemae worked primarily in painting. Using a palette knife and oils, he repeatedly executed microscopic marks in bold colours, often primary reds, yellows, and blues. Covering the entire canvas in repetitive marks—expansive from a distance and innumerable when seen close up—Uemae's accumulation of lines, dots, or shapes were sometimes referred to as 'pointillist', though they possessed a more tactile physicality than a strictly two-dimensional painting.
In 1984, Gutai member Shozo Shimamoto described Uemae's process, writing that he 'would paint dots of paint, creating layer after layer... He painted dots of red paint and then dots of yellow paint so the bottom colour disappeared... These works communicate with a completely different forcefulness from those that are more straightforward'.
Uemae's large-scale Untitled (1963) demonstrates a self-referentiality of the painting medium. Dominated by a cream grid on a fire-engine red background, Untitled incorporates paint tube caps embedded in thick applications of oil paint on the canvas surface. Uemae often highlighted the visibility of unconventional materials, including wood, sawdust, string, and cloth, dissolving the boundaries between painting and sculpture.
Uemae's later oil paintings incorporated a repeated rounded-edge square pattern which became a recurring motif in his works. Following a logic that may be compared to textile design, Uemae produced similar compositions through etching, lithography, and silkscreen printing, as can be observed in Untitled 6-6 (2011) or Untitled 4-6 (2012).
Uemae experimented with sculpture, often taking a Constructivist approach as seen in his Kigumi wooden sculptures of the 1970s. Untitled (1972), a monolithic structure on a miniature scale, is assembled in a pared back arrangement of uniform rectangular blocks of grey wood. Appearing top-heavy, with an increasing quantity of blocks dominating the upper half of the structure, Untitled may be viewed as a study of material balance.
From the mid-1970s, Uemae began working with textiles and embroidery in what became known as his 'Nui' series (stitch works). Often reworked, Uemae meticulously stitched silks and other cloths with minimal abstract compositions, colour blocks. and geometric grid-like forms.
In 1998, Uemae described his intention with this series as to explore a new medium: 'I have created these stitch works (Nui) as a work of pure art, because using oil paints or fibres makes no difference to me. They are both simply materials'.
Chiyu Uemae has exhibited throughout Japan and internationally.
Uemae has been the subject of solo exhibitions at galleries and museums including Axel Vervoordt Gallery, Antwerp (2023); Gallery Nippon, Tokyo (2020); Whitestone Gallery, Hong Kong (2019, 2015); Gallery Shimada, Kobe (2012); and Gallery LADS, Osaka (2011).
Select group exhibitions include The Yamamura Collection: Gutai and the Japanese Avant-Garde 1950s–1980s, Hyogo Prefectural Museum of Art, Kobe (2019); Gutai, Hauser & Wirth, New York (2018); Gutai, l'espace et le temps, Musée Soulages, Rodez (2018); Gutai Spirit, H.ARTS Collective, Singapore (2017); Gutai: Splendid Playground, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (2012); and Tokyo 1955–1970: A New Avant-Garde, Museum of Modern Art, New York (2012).
Uemae's works are held in public and private collections worldwide, including Artizon Museum, Tokyo; Hyogo Prefectural Museum of Art, Kobe; The National Museum of Art, Osaka; Fukuoka Art Museum; Goetz Collection, Sammlung Ingvild Goetz, Munich; Musée Cantini, Marseille; The Miyagi Museum of Art, Sendai; Yokohama Museum of Art; and The Rachofsky Collection, Dallas; among others.
Misong Kim | Ocula | 2023
