Community of Images: Keiji Uematsu in Germany
From Action, Stone—Nail—String—Light, 1976, 14:30 min, open reel video, color, sound
This October, we present our third program in the ongoing series, Community of Images: Japanese Moving Image Artists in the US, 1960s-1970s. In line with our focus the activities of Japanese artists overseas, we feature a selection of early moving-image works by the artist Keiji Uematsu, made during his first period of residence in Düsseldorf, West Germany. Since this decade-long stay in the mid-1970s, Keiji Uematsu has split his life and career between Germany and Japan.
The screening is accompanied by a partial translation of a 2016 interview with the artist, included below. The interview was conducted by the Oral History Archives of Japanese Art, an online initiative which preserves the endangered legacy of postwar art in Japan through the medium of oral storytelling. The full recorded interview & Japanese transcript are accessible on their website, offering valuable insight into Uematsu’s life and career.
October Members’ Viewing
Keiji Uematsu, Drawing—Black｜1976, 2:32 min, video, color, silent
Keiji Uematsu, Measuring—Corner｜1976, 11:40 min, open reel video, color, sound
Keiji Uematsu, Action, Stone—Nail—String—Light｜1976, 14:30 min, open reel video, color, sound
Become a member for just $5 a month to access our monthly programs, and share your thoughts on our screenings with us via Twitter, Instagram or Letterboxd.
The programs will be available for viewing on CCJ’s viewing platform (click here).
This Members Viewing program is supported, in part, by a grant from the Toshiba International Foundation.
Introduction
The information in this text has been adapted largely from the two-part interview (1,2) conducted in 2016 by the Oral History Archives of Japanese Art. The conversation took place between Keiji Uematsu and interviewers Tsukasa Ikegami and Kōhei Yamashita at Uematsu’s home in Minoo, Osaka Prefecture. It was transcribed by Junko Gosho.
Six years into his career as an artist, Keiji Uematsu made the decision to go abroad. Born in Kobe, he graduated from a degree in arts education in 1969, and alongside teaching went on to exhibit works at the Hakone Open Air Museum, Kyoto’s Galerie 16, and in the 1972 Kyoto Biennale. Winning the one-million yen prize of the 1974 Kobe City Cultural Encouragement Award in 1974, Uematsu took the opportunity to spend time overseas, and moved to Düsseldorf, Germany, in September 1975.
“The country that I was most interested in and active at that time was Germany,” tells Uematsu in his interview with the Oral History Archives of Japanese Art, citing the country’s significance on the map of global contemporary art. The 5th Documenta exhibition, curated by Harald Szeemann, was hosted in Kassel in 1972 (where many artists from Düsseldorf exhibited). “Germany was the most interesting. New York was too big, too hard… and I wasn’t really interested in what was going on in Paris in terms of contemporary art. I thought it would be best to go to the country where things were really moving, so I chose Germany.” [1]
And so, in 1974 Uematsu submitted his work to a group exhibition in Düsseldorf entitled Japanese Tradition and Modernity, the first exhibition focusing on Japanese contemporary art to be planned by independently by a European arts institution. He emigrated there the following year. Despite the city’s lack of high-profile contemporary galleries, Uematsu cited the number of active artists in the area as a reason to go, prioritising a sense of artistic community over other locations (such as Cologne) with greater professional opportunities. Uematsu befriended a circle of artists, among whom were artists Bernd Becher, who was teaching at the Düsseldorf Kunstakademie, and his wife Hilla Becher, known for their taxonomic photographs of industrial buildings. At the Kunsthalle, Düsseldorf’s foremost arts museum, Uematsu found a venue to socialise with other artists: its nightly events included performances by Fluxus members Nam June Paik and Charlotte Moorman, as well as by John Cage and Karlheinz Stockhausen. It was here Uematsu was able to meet and talk with members of the international art community, including fellow video artist Paik.
Uematsu’s work during the mid-1970s was concerned with the properties of different materials - stone, wood, string, light, ink, paper - and different forms, and their relationships with forces such as gravity, human action or the work of machines. Speaking in a recent interview for ARETE, Uematsu shares, “I believe that my artistic concept has remained unchanged since 1969. […] What I aim to achieve is to unveil visible connections and relationships by revealing the underlying structures governed by invisible laws of power.”[2]
In his video works, often composed in a single take, the artist illustrates these relationships visually and in time, through performed actions and using techniques such as zooms. These works also engage with ideas of reproduction, juxtaposing photographs or printed matter with objects or actions existing in three dimensions. As influential figures on his practice in Germany, Uematsu names Klaus Rinke, whose work similarly concerned the human body and its range of movement, and Reiner Ruthenbeck, whose work investigated the properties of matter and form. Uematsu was able to meet both of these artists, along with Rinke’s collaborator Monika Baumgartl, during his early years in Düsseldorf.
Just one year after his move, Uematsu’s first major European solo exhibition was held in 1976 at the Moderna Museet in Stockholm, where he was also the first Japanese artist ever to exhibit. Other solo exhibitions include those at Gallery Hetzler + Keller in Stuttgart in 1977, the Kunsthalle Düsseldorf itself, and the Heidelberg Kunstverein in 1979. Before this, he participated in various group exhibitions, including one organised by Klaus Rinke’s students in the Museum Wiesbaden. Yet despite his artistic success, Uematsu would begin holding an art class for elementary school students from 1979 in order to make ends meet. As a Japanese expat in Düsseldorf under the restrictions of the German ‘Freelance Artist’ visa, Uematsu could not engage in any paid work other than art. “In the end, art alone was not enough to make a living,” says Uematsu, attesting to the financial and bureaucratic frustrations often familiar to artists working internationally. [3]
The works in the October program, also available on-demand to subscribers to the CCJ Viewing Library, were all created for this first exhibition in Stockholm in 1976. The easy reproducibility of these early works, using photographs, performance and everyday materials, helped to facilitate their transportation across countries. Drawing-Black adopted the same concept as a previous work but was re-made expressly for this exhibition.
Today, Uematsu continues to work between Japan and Germany, maintaining a studio in Düsseldorf. He will hold a solo exhibition at Gallery Nomart in Osaka in 2024.
notes
Interview with Keiji Uematsu
EXCERPT FROM KEIJI UEMATSU ORAL HISTORY #2, 09/28/2016
This interview, which discusses Uematsu’s life and work in detail, was originally conducted on September 28, 2016 by Tsukasa Ikegami and Kōhei Yamashita, and later transcribed by Junko Gosho. It has been translated into English by Colin Smith.
After several years living in Germany, in the early ‘80s Uematsu received an offer from Tsukuba University to return to Japan as a teacher. The excerpt’s point of departure is his reaction to this offer, and the reflections it inspired on his identity as a Japanese artist working in Europe.
From Action, Stone—Nail—String—Light, 1976, 14:30 min, open reel video, color, sound
Hiroko Ikegami: So you were asked if you would come back and teach.
Uematsu: Yes, but I wasn’t sure how to respond. That was before I visited New York, around the end of 1980, I think. It was my fifth year or so [in Germany]... At the time I thought I might be ready to go back to Japan, but at the same time I really wanted to stay in Germany. So the offer from Tsukuba University fell through, and I stayed abroad. After about ten years, then, I thought, “If I stay on, I’ll end up being here for twenty years.” At that point I felt like I knew enough to get by. My works were selling a bit, and I figured I could make a living and make my way there. But I thought, if I really stayed there for twenty years, I would end up not belonging anywhere. There would be no place for me in Japan, no place to go back to. After all, I was not a German in Germany, even after living there for ten years. I was treated differently from a “real” German artist. Over there I was a guest in their eyes, and they wouldn’t get jealous of any success I might achieve there, because I’m Japanese. Artists in Düsseldorf were in fierce “Konkurrenz (competition),” but as an outsider I could move about easily in their circles. However, I realized that even if I stayed there for twenty years, I would still be a guest. That’s when I decided to go back to Japan.
Prior to that, I had been thinking about something like the primordial essence of Japan. When I had exhibitions in various places, I was asked how my work related to Japan. I often got that question in my early days in Europe, because people didn’t understand my work. So they’d ask, “How does your work relate to Zen?” and things like that. You know, I don’t know much about Zen, either. I guess they made that association because I used natural materials like rocks and tree branches. They saw in my work something that couldn’t be fully explained with logic, because my work looked totally different from their own work. So when people asked me questions like that, I thought to myself, “Oh, I guess I really am Japanese after all.” I left Japan when I was 28, which means I lived there for 28 years and absorbed its climate, history, culture, way of thinking, and various other aspects. I was carrying my Japanese blood around me and making work within that background, so in that sense, it made perfect sense that my work looked Japanese. It struck me that it’s part of my identity, that it’s only natural for it to emerge and there’s no need to go out of my way to suppress it.
Then I thought, what if this Japanese essence within me were to vanish? That wouldn’t be me anymore, no? So I thought I would like to keep this primal Japanese something inside me alive. When I was working in Germany, I felt as if I was going around with a hachimaki [Japanese cotton towel] on my head, something that clearly revealed my nationality. It was only after going abroad that I became conscious of being Japanese, and of Japan as a country. That had never happened when I was physically in Japan. I continued working abroad for one year, three years, five years, and ten years, and even though art is said to be an international language, I still felt it was strange not to be working in my own country where I had been born and raised. So, I started going back to Japan once every two years or so to do solo exhibitions. I realized that as a Japanese person, it’s important to work in Japan. That got me thinking about a lot of things. For instance, even though Pop Art first originated in the UK, it’s quintessentially American, with Andy Warhol and all. Or when you see works by Joseph Beuys, you can tell they are German. Everyone incorporates something [of their own country] into their art, and I thought I needed to work within that context. “National” is the root of “international,” you know. There is no such word as “international” without “national.”
Kōhei Yamashita: When you were in group shows in Europe, did you feel that your work was different from that of other artists?
Uematsu: Well, I always thought of art as an international language and never considered my work to be particularly Japanese. It was only when someone made a remark to that effect that I thought, “Oh, I guess there is something Japanese about it…?” That’s when it hit me, I started feeling Japan in my work in some way.
Tsukasa Ikegami: So, you came to understand it from the perspective of people over there?
Uematsu: Yes, that’s how it was.
program
Keiji Uematsu, Drawing—Black｜1976, 2:32 min, video, color, silent
A clipping from a German magazine showing a line of showgirls is slowly coloured in with a black marker. Although the pen colours the image part-by-part, beginning with the human figures and ending with the written text, the illusion of separate forms slowly disappears, replaced by a flat black surface.
Keiji Uematsu, Measuring—Corner｜1976, 11:40 min, open reel video, color, sound
Uematsu was planning to present Drawing—Black and Work—Seeing overseas and brought the tapes over, but the tape format was not compatible for playback there. As a quick replacement, this work was made. It was around the time Uematsu was making photography works using his body to measure.
The work opens with an image of a hand framing the corner of a rectangular piece of paper. As the camera zooms out, the image is revealed to be a photograph, and another hand moves to frame the rectangular photograph itself. As the work progresses, various other body parts are used as frames, and extreme zooms are used to transition changes in the layout of the scene while preserving continuity. The focus switches between ‘real’ arrangements of body parts and their photographed copies, leaving distinctions between two-dimensional and three-dimensional, animate and inanimate, intentionally unclear.
Keiji Uematsu, Action, Stone—Nail—String—Light｜1976, 14:30 min, open reel video, color, sound
Exploring the interaction of form, human agency and various natural and artificial materials, this work takes the form of a filmed performance by Uematsu himself. Beginning by swinging a lightbulb in a circle and smashing it on the ground, the artist arranges a series of materials - stones, nails, and string - in a square, a triangle, and a line respectively, testing how these shapes might be outlined using maximum economy of means. He finishes by arranging cut reels of video-tape around himself in a circle.
Keiji uematsu
Born in 1947 in Hyogo Prefecture, Keiji Uematsu graduated from the department of Fine Arts, Kobe University in 1969 and moved to Germany in 1975. Since 1986 he has resided and worked in both Minoo city, Japan, and Düsseldorf, Germany. Uematsu has exhibited works illustrating relationships between the body and objects, and has pursued strategies to render visible, unseen forces, such as gravity and magnetism, and reveal the underlying structure. The use of natural materials such as wood, stone, fabric, and metal, as well as the fact that his activities were contemporaneous to the prolific artists associated with the movement Mono-ha, give a false notion that his work is also connected to the movement. Instead of attention to the inherent state of natural and industrial materials, and their relation to the environmental space surrounding them, Uematsu’s focus is on expose the structures and relationships of the physical world that may not be visible. Since the 1970s, Uematsu began making film and video works. There were a number of fine artists at the time who took the moving image to create conceptual works. This was not a mere documentation of their performances but a strategy to visualize their practice and process. Within this movement, Uematsu produced important works and presented in the annual fine artists’ moving image exhibition in Tokyo, Exhibition of Contemporary Plastic Art: Expression in Film, as well as broadcast a collaborative work, Image of Image—Seeing with artist Tatsuo Kawaguchi and Saburo Murakami at NHK Kobe.
Major solo exhibitions include Relation of Matters (Galerie 16, Kyoto, 1974), Keiji Uematsu: Skulptur Foto Video Film (Moderna Museet Stockholm, 1976-77), Series, Today’s Artist, Installation and Photo (Osaka Contemporary Art Center, 1981), Keiji Uematsu: eyes under physical consideration - photographs, videos and films 1972-2003 (Kitakyushu Municipal Museum of Art, Fukuoka, 2003), and Keiji Uematsu: The Garden of Time (Otani Memorial Art Museum, Nishinomiya City, Hyogo, 2006). Major group exhibitions include Photography in Contemporary Art (The National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo, and elsewhere, 1983-84), the 43rd Venice Biennale, Japan Pavilion (1988), and Performing for the Camera (Tate Modern, London, 2016).
community of images: Japanese moving image artists in the uS, 1960s - 1970s
Community of Images: Japanese Moving Image Artists in the US, 1960s-1970s will be an exhibition of experimental moving images created by Japanese artists in the U.S. during the 1960s and 70s, an area that has fallen in the fissure between American and Japanese archival priorities. Following JASGP's Re:imagining Recovery Project and its mission to support and engage diverse audiences through Japanese arts and culture in collaboration with local organizations, this project aims to discover, preserve, and present film and video works and performance footage by Japanese filmmakers and artists to the wider public.
We have partnered with the University of the Arts, and will present this exhibition at the Philadelphia Arts Alliance in June - August 2024.
The project is generously supported by the Pew Center for Arts and Heritage & the Andy Warhol Foundation.
