Chiyu Uemae

Prior to joining the Gutai, Chiyu Uemae studied nan-ga - the southern school of Chinese painting - as self-taught, then shifts to oil painting. Uemae won the first prize at the annual exhibition of the Niki-kai, an artist organisation formed in 1947, and had his first solo show at a public library in Manazuru in 1951. In November 1953, Uemae met Jiro Yoshihara, and since then, the artist takes part in every Gutai exhibition until its dissolution.

Unlike many of his Gutai peers, Uemae is not known for using action as the basis of his mixed-media works. The charm of Uemae consists in the elaborated materials and its accumulation of introspective energies. Uemae's painting style is characterised by repetitive gestures and by an interest in ordinary materials such as matches, paint tubes and sawdust. Between 1956 and 1964, he creates works encrusted with the detritus of everyday life, bringing beauty to humble materials. The canvases themselves are often patched together from scraps, evincing post-war frugality and a lack of fetishism for the traditional materials of painting.ⁱ

In Uemae's works, an interesting issue is the size of his paintings. Many are small, with the colour resonating like jewels on the wall. The work of Gutai artists is remarkable in the articulation and discovery of the sensorial world within the chosen artistic materials; size often seems not an issue - it's how the materials resonate within the space of the canvas. Uemae seems to have no problem in downsizing his artworks and it shows for they are really succinct images, loaded with countless dots or painterly traces. His obsessive attention to dots is a tribute to the vestiges left behind by all living things. These works elucidate and portray how he creates the dots by repudiating all literary elements. Each dot is individual and distinct - a direct metaphor for existence itself. These paint was not manifested with a brush, but dabbed or pushed with other tools, like a palette knife, revealing an intricate understanding of the qualities of paint and how it, as a substance, could adequately fill the void of a space via its application on a canvas or panel into something that is then transformed into immensely interesting, applied with individual human passion.

His larger works are laced with extreme applications of paint as a cohesive image. They are purely about the material, such as oil paint, occupying the surface of the canvas, and intelligently applied in layer after layer, with small particles of hues, refracting colour from where the over painting, hasn't happened.

Work by Uemae was exhibited at the International Art of a New Era: Informel and Gutai exhibition in 1958, where his work took place between a canvas by Yves Klein and one by Jean-Paul Riopelle. Later it was the important critic Michel Tapiè who expressed his admiration for the work of Uemae. Tapiè further spread the awareness of Uemae's work, which - depending on the context - is compared to that of Gutai artist Masatoshi Masanobu, to pointillism or to the visual effect evocated by the then emerging Op Art artists.

In later years, Uemae transferred his practice to textile art. His intricately embroidered abstract works have since become well known in the textile world. Uemae believes his most formative experience was an apprenticeship in Kyozome, or the Kyoto style of dyeing. Because of this training, as well as a childhood immersed in non-figurative design, the practice of sewing became paramount to Uemae's mature style. His mixed-media paintings sometimes feature textile elements, but are characteristically identified by his careful compositions comprised of fine dots or patterns.

Uemae remained active in his 90s, producing etchings and silkscreens.