Yuichiro Ukai

Born 1995 in Shiga prefecture, Japan

  Yuichiro Ukai is autistic, and since 2014 has been a member of Atelier Yamanami, a facility in Shiga prefecture that provides a range of activities for the intellectually and developmentally challenged. Ukai devoted himself to drawing within this safe environment that provided him with a large desk, an abundance of art materials, an extensive reference library, and a structured lifestyle. 

  Dinosaurs, insects, trains, Anpanman, Doraemon, Pocket Monsters, and characters from Hayao Miyazaki’s My Neighbor Totoro and Spirited Away, familiar to any boy or girl of his generation, are Ukai’s favorite subjects. These are not real figures, and of course Ukai himself has not encountered them either; he only knows of them through visual references from pictorial encyclopedias of dinosaurs, trains, or compendia of Anpanman and Pokémon characters, which he has pored over tirelessly from a very young age.

  Ukai clearly takes various sources of information as references and personalizes them. In addition to characters from contemporary subculture such as manga and anime, he incorporates materials that appeal to him from traditional Japanese art such as nanban screens of the 16th –17th century and Edo uikiyo-e which in turn were subcultures of their own times. 

 Ukai selects icons that resonate to him from the pages of these reference materials that he peruses, as if taking rapid scans of each page with his intense gaze.

"In that sense, Yuichiro Ukai’s work could be seen as a prime example of postmodern aesthetics: the seamless mixing and mingling of historical styles, ranging from antediluvian creatures to early modern visual traditions (nanban, ukiyo-e), interspersed with numerous allusions to post-1945 and contemporary Japanese popular culture. The iterative and cumulative nature of this process of quotation fully justifies a comparison with contemporary Japanese artists of the ‘Superflat’ movement. It is also, more prosaically, a direct result of the broad availability of image reproduction, a process that tends to erase historical differences between visual traditions, as theorized by philosophers and art historians ranging from Walter Benjamin to John Berger."

Extract from Raphael Koenig, “The Labyrinth of Plentitude: Navigating Yuichiro Ukai’s Visual Works,” in Beauties, Ghosts, and Samurai: The Japanese Pop Culture Tradition from Edo Ukiyo-e to Manga, Anime and Sūpā Fratto in the 20th and 21st Centuries【exhibition catalogue】(Vilnius: Lithuanian National Museum of Art, 2024) 

Ukai had a good year in 2024, blessed with the opportunity to participate in two brilliant exhibitions: Beauties, Ghosts and Samurai: The Japanese Pop Culture Traditions from Edo Ukiyo-e to Manga, Anime, and Sūpā Furatto in the 20th and 21st Centuries at the National Gallery of Art in Vilnius, Lithuania and The Way I See It: Selections from the KAWS Collection at the Drawing Center in New York.

Beauties, Ghosts and Samurai was an ambitious exhibition that traced the history of Japanese pop art, from Edo-period ukiyo-e to caricatures, manga, anime, and contemporary art. Ukai was selected as the youngest artist in this lineage, with seven of his early works exhibited. Seen alongside acclaimed artists such as Utagawa Kuniyoshi (1797–1861), Kawanabe Kyōsai (1831–1889), and Takashi Murakami (b. 1961), it was demonstrated that Ukai has inherited the DNA of Japanese art, not only in motifs but also in elements such as flat, shadowless expressions and storytelling that unfolds from right to left, reminiscent of traditional picture scrolls.

  Additionally, The Way I See It: Selections from the KAWS Collection was a cutting-edge exhibition. KAWS, one of the most popular and successful creators of today, is very reserved about himself; yet through this exhibition, which represents only a small part of his collection, we could glimpse the way he sees. As an ardent fan of rather eccentric creations outside the canon, he has been collecting so-called “street art” and “outsider art” for more than 25 years. The Way I See It revealed that certain creative impulses, which have been alienated under such labels, and considered to be outside of society and mainstream art, are actually capturing the Zeitgeist of the contemporary era on a much broader scale. 

Solo Exhibition

2023 – 2024

Yuichiro Ukai, Venus Over Manhattan, New York, NY

Selected Group Exhibitions

2019

Eye Eye Nose Mouth: Art, Disability, and Mental Illness in Nanjing, China and Shiga-ken, Japan, Harvard University Asian Center, Cambridge, MA

Japon Brut, la lune, le soleil, yamanami, Christian Berst Art Brut, Paris, France

2022

Genius: The Human Gift for Creating and Living, Shiga Museum of Art, Otsu, Japan

Multitudes, American Folk Art Museum, New York, NY

2023

Worlds in Balance: Art in Japan from the Postwar to the Present, The Okura Museum of Art, Tokyo, Japan

2024

Beauties, Ghosts and Samurai: Japanese Pop Culture Tradition from Edo Ukiyo-e to Manga, Anime, and Sūpā Fratto in the 20th and 21st centuries, National Gallery of Art, Vilnius, Lithuania

The Way I See It: Selection from the KAWS Collection, The Drawing Center, New York, NY

Public Collections

American Folk Art Museum, New York, NY

Shiga Museum of Art, Otsu, Japan

Shiga Prefecture's Self-Taught Artist by Tetsuya Ozaki 

(Originally published in the Kyoto Shimbun online magazin, THE KYOTO, December 20th 2024)

Yuichiro Ukai is autistic and works at the welfare facility Atelier Yamanami in Koka City, Shiga Prefecture, and is known as an “outsider artist.” This term is an unpleasant label, almost like a barrier, created by the so-called "insiders." If I had to use a different term, "self-taught artist" would be more fitting. On the other hand, I believe that most self-taught art has little connection to contemporary art post-Duchamp. The reason is that the creative impulse is so strong and while the impact is noticeable, the concepts and deeper layers of meaning remain thin. However, Ukai’s works are consistentely endowed with those three essential elements.

Ukai’s preferred subjects include skeletons, monsters, dinosaurs, wild animals, livestock, nobility and samurai, courtesans and geishas, kabuki actors and sumo wrestlers, as well as characters from anime and manga. It is precisely the subject matter of Japan's pop culture tradition from Edo period ukiyo-e to 20th-21st-century manga, anime and sūpā furatto featuring a parade of "Beauties, Ghosts and Samurai."

Ukai’s works can be seen as a honkadori (a technique of poetic allusion, where a new work references an older, widely recognized poem to evoke its themes and significance) of the Hyakki Yagyō Emaki (Night Parade of One Hundred Demons scroll) images that have been created since the Muromachi period, but his are densely drawn with colored pencils and markers on yellow board paper. The Beauties, Ghosts, and Samurai exhibition also featured works depicting nanban ships and trains, which appeared to carry forward the tradition of emakimono (picture scrolls). 

It is often said that repeating similar images is a characteristic of “outsider artists,” but in Ukai’s case, I believe there is a conceptual necessity behind it. By utilizing the emakimono format, Ukai visualizes the flow of movement and time, while also expressing the energy that propels history forward. Ukai’s works are two-dimensional, still images, but they feel almost like animated films. If they were to be made into videos, they would become powerful moving images, much like the Shintomi-za Yōkai Hikimaku (Shintomi-za Kabuki Theatre Curtain) (1880) by Kawanabe Kyōsai.

Kyōsai frequently depicted the Hyakki Yagyō, one version of which was published in Kyōsai Sui-ga (Kyōsai’s Intoxicated Drawings, vol.2) (1883). This was seen exhibited alongside his Yōkai Hikimaku. Ukai appears to be a fan of Utagawa Kuniyoshi, but it’s possible he also references Kyōsai.

Ukai's favorite books reportedly include Dinosaur Encyclopedia, Vehicle Encyclopedia, Anpanman Encyclopedia, Pokémon Encyclopedia, Yōkai Encyclopedia, Kuniyoshi and Kunisada, and Masterpieces of Namban Byōbu. The curator and gallerist Yukiko Koide stated, "Ukai intensely scrutinizes those books, flipping through pages as if performing a high-speed scan, extracting the icons that resonate deeply with him." "High-speed scan" is an apt metaphor as it seems that Ukai is transforming his brain into a database of images.

Text by Tetsuya OZAKI 
Editor-in-chief, Realkyoto Forum 
Professor, Graduate School, Kyoto University of the Arts

https://www.kyoto-np.co.jp/articles/thekyoto/1380554