Whitestone Gallery: Taipei ZhongXiao is pleased to present Kiro Uehara’s solo exhibition “Space in ink”.
Born in Niigata Prefecture in 1948, Kiro Uehara met Shuzo Takiguchi when he was young, and was introduced to Surrealism. In 1969 Uehara saw a roman-collage novel by Max Ernst, La Femme 100 Têtes (The Hundred-Headed Woman, 1929), and was deeply moved. He created his first collage work around this time. In 1974 he moved to Italy to study Commedia dell’Arte (classic Italian comedy performed with masks). After returning to Japan, Uehara, based in Niigata, presented a series of collage works by reassembling images of pop culture. These images were familiar to him, since he used items from his father’s collection at home as materials. In addition to his highly detailed pencil drawings, recently Uehara has been creating paintings of Abstract Expressionism, a movement that arose from Dada and Surrealism. He also produces “abstract ink paintings” using Chinese ink. He utilizes the techniques he has acquired over the years, such as frottage and ro- to-drawing, to compose paintings that have a feel of spaciousness, floating objects and repetitions. In 2010 a large-scale two-artist exhibition “Surrealism in East and West - Kiro Uehara and Max Ernst” was held at the Regensburg City Gallery in Germany. In 2011 a three-artist exhibition “Magic and Alchemy: Jan Švankmajer, Max Ernst, and Kiro Uehara” was held in Tokyo. In 2017 he participated in the group exhibition “Crisscrossing East and West: The Remaking of Ink Art in Contemporary East Asia” at Yinchuan Museum of Contemporary Art.