"Since ancient times, humanity has gazed at the starry sky. Even now, when I look upon the vast canvas painted with countless stars, the cares of human society seem to fade away, and I am enveloped in an elegant atmosphere." Chiyu Uemae
Chiyu Uemae’s practice transcends conventional artistic production to embody a profound meditation on existence. Through his meticulous pointillist abstractions and later textile works, Uemae articulates a deeply personal cosmology at the intersection of humanity, labour, materiality, and temporal awareness.
In the landscape of post-war Japanese art, Uemae emerges as a singular presence. As one of the few artists who remained with the pioneering Gutai Art Association from its inception until its dissolution, Uemae's oeuvre represents a unique trajectory within the movement's radical experimentations. Cosmology presents sixteen pivotal works from the 1950s to the 2000s, offering a contemplative journey through the accumulated gestures of Uemae’s personal and creative life.
Born into profound poverty in 1920 in a frigid village in Kyoto Prefecture, Uemae's early life was marked by loss and precarity. His father’s premature death and his mother's chronic frailty cast long shadows over his childhood. Yet, within this austere mountain existence, he found his first creative impulse, discovering an innate affinity for making things during elementary school. This nascent artistic sensibility would lie dormant as circumstances forced him into premature adulthood—unable to attend middle school, he was sent to work at a kimono cleaning shop in Kyoto, shouldering the responsibility of supporting his family through manual labour.
The seemingly insurmountable distance between his non-artistic daily existence and his innate creative gifts found resolution through an almost destined encounter with the Gutai Art Association (1954-1972) led by Jiro Yoshihara. His raw talent, previously constrained by circumstance, flourished within this avant-garde context, transforming his lived experience of poverty and labour into a unique artistic vocabulary.
For Uemae, the fundament of self-existence stands between “labour” and “creation"—yet these ostensibly opposing forces found synthesis in his practice. While working as a crane operator in a foundry, he sacrificed sleep to pursue art, finding a profound source of inspiration in this dual existence. He stated, “In my mind, strong feelings of inferiority and an unshakeable sense of superiority flow like atmospheric pressure." This duality powerfully manifested in an early Gutai period, where his work gained international recognition, showing at the Martha Jackson Gallery in New York (1958) and later at the Galerie Stadler in Paris (1965), championed by the influential French critic Michel Tapié.
The exhibition's centrepiece, “Untitled" (1965/1982), exemplifies Uemae's ability to transmute quotidian experience into transcendent abstraction. Its burning red hues and obsessive accumulation of points speak to both the physicality of labour and the ethereal nature of consciousness. In this work, the artist's regularity, daily routine, and repetitive actions sublimate into a pointillist meditation on existence itself, embodying Yoshihara's mandate from the Gutai Art Manifesto (1956): “Gutai Art imparts life to matter; the human spirit and matter shake hands with each other while keeping their distance."
Yoshihara continues, “The importance lies not in the result but in the action of leaving one's trace within the material." While this often evokes Kazuo Shiraga's foot paintings or Atsuko Tanaka's electric dresses, Uemae's absolute abstraction, born from repetitive painting acts, became an affirmation of existence. It appeared as a form of individual action—not merely documenting his daily routine but marking the traces of his life in the material itself.
Post-Gutai, Uemae's artistic path led him to explore the materiality of textile work, creating the “stitching series" (NUI series) from 1975 onwards. Threading a needle and stitching fabric one stitch at a time was labour-intensive. From cloth to needle and string to mind and hands, this primordial, repetitive action emerged as a materialisation and visualisation of accumulated time and labour, resulting in works with a high density of stitching. These works incorporated materials laden with social significance: patchwork clothing worn by peasants, layers of reinforced cloth, and “wipers" used to clean oil from the cumbersome machinery he operated. Each stitch became a marker of time, a testament to perseverance, and a reflection on the nature of existence itself.
In Uemae's cosmology, the relationship between self and other, material and void, action and contemplation, dissolves into a unified field of artistic inquiry. His work suggests that existence is an accumulation of moments, marks, and movements. Each element sublimates his life's harsh realities and conflicts into his art, granting it autonomy.
References:
“Asahi Journal” , September 27, 1964
Memorandum of Chiyu Uemae, written by Kunio Motoe
“A Solitary Path”, Chiyu Uemae, published in 1995
