Kako Ueda

Tori Tori Tori

May 12 - July 1, 2023

View Works

Olympia is pleased to present Tori Tori Tori, a solo presentation of works on paper by Kako Ueda. Painted and drawn, with paper cut-outs layered and composited towards sculptural effect, Ueda’s hybrid process echoes the chimeric collaging taking place among the animals in the show. Exhibiting imaginary beings up to her recent engagement with the movement and flight of birds, Tori Tori Tori, is a labyrinth of a mind left to dreaming; holding a mirror up to the theme of migration and the presence of the chimera both literal and symbolic.

While the common use of the word migration is for the seasonal movement of animals from one region to another, a secondary one as meaningful for the works is the movement from one part of something to another. This latter definition drifts into the mythological chimera, who in ancient Greek sources is made up of a lion’s head, a goat’s body, a serpent’s tail, and is fire-breathing. The chimeras of Tori Tori Tori are hybrid beasts that are part animal, flower, insect, or people. They are fantastical whose identities are only partially revealed. In these creatures, a migration is pictured to be taking place within. The edges of their cut-out shapes are thresholds for instinct, pulsing life, and a local wilderness inhabiting or haunting each one.    

Throughout her career, Ueda has obsessively explored the interrelationship between different organisms and the dichotomy seen between nature and culture, as evidenced in the realms of art, science, history, and anthropology. In tandem with her practice of cutting paper as a new way of drawing, which she discovered 25 years ago, she was an archivist and now curator of The Archive for Research in Archetypal Symbolism (ARAS), an extensive picture archive for Jungian psychological thought. Ueda’s practice is thus informed by the poetry of dictionaries (the drawings on rectangular sheets are directly influenced by Medieval bestiaries), with art historical visual elements encountered in and out the Archive referenced sparingly in her cut-out works. 

While the themes of migration and metamorphosis speak to Ueda’s career-long  interests – as well as her biography, having left Japan at the age of 15 to move to the US on her own – her recent attention towards birds in particular (tori being Japanese for bird) is also in conversation with the disturbing movements in the modern farming industry. The killing of wild birds is taking place all over the world via the man-made catastrophe of the bird flu; hawks, falcons, owls, ducks, loons, vultures, crows, gulls, wild geese, and countless other species, are falling out of the sky. And while this is happening outside of most people’s purview, the virus requires just enough mutation to be another human nightmare.  

Of the chimera, Borges notes in his Book of Imaginary Beings, “the incoherent shape fades away and the word remains to stand for ‘the Impossible.’” Tori Tori Tori shows a varied sense of impossibility when it comes to forces in nature and culture – that of things hoped for, and sometimes of harmony, between the historical, the real, and the imagined.

Kako Ueda is an artist who examines the tension arising from the relationship between nature and human culture. She creates her “2 and a half dimensional” artwork mainly by cutting, collaging and layering paper with and without paint. She is a two-time recipient of the New York Foundation for the Arts grant. She has been exhibiting both nationally and internationally for 25 years, including at the Museum of Art and Design, NYC, Contemporary Art Museum Kiasma, Helsinki, Finland, DeCordova Museum, MA, John Michael Kohler Art Center, WI, and the Mint Museum, NC. Ueda lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.