Yozo Ukita

Yōzō Ukita was born in Osaka. During the war years, he was drafted to the air force at Kakamigahara in Gifu Prefecture, where he did aircraft maintenance.[1] After the end of his military service, he worked in Osaka for Ozaki Shobō, a publishing company.[2] In 1948, Ukita, Yoshiro Hoshi and Adachi Ken'ichi began to work on Kirin, a new literary magazine for children founded the year before by Iku Takenaka and Yasushi Inoue.[2] Ukita spent his days visiting elementary schools in the Kinki region, speaking with teachers and gathering children's poetry. In the evenings he assembled Kirin in a makeshift office of a small shack.[3]

The editors of Kirin originally asked local artists to produce covers for the magazine. Ukita first met Jiro Yoshihara, an Ashiya-based businessman, artist and future leader of Gutai, after asking him to contribute a cover to the magazine in 1948. From 1950 onwards, children's art would also be used on the cover. Ukita was then tasked with choosing pieces by local children, developing all the while a deep appreciation for their fresh, unexpected and diverse artistic styles.[3]

After Ukita joined Gutai in 1955, many Gutai artists, including Atsuko Tanaka, Shōzō Shimamoto, Kazuo Shiraga, Masatoshi Masanobu, Saburō Murakami, Sadamasa Motonaga and Tsuruko Yamazaki had their artworks featured in Kirin.[2] Ukita also incited his fellow artists not just to contribute artworks, but also short articles for the young readers. Gutai artists published 60 such articles.[4] They spoke both seriously and playfully about art and creativity, and encouraged children to discover their individuality, as illustrated by Ukita's own short essay "On Being Weird," in which he called on children to embrace that which made them different:

What is weird within you is your treasure. [...] Some people are called "weirdos" in our society. They are often disliked by other people.

In my opinion, though, we need to be "weirdos" to the very core. If a person is not a weirdo, he has no value as a human being.

[...] We are all blessed, born with something weird. Please start looking immediately for whatever is weird in you.[5]

Gutai scholars and art historians Katō Mizuho and Ming Tiampo have both posited that Kirin is an important source for understanding Gutai's creative motivations as a whole.[2][4]

In December 1955, Ukita and several other Gutai artists organized at the Osaka City Museum of Fine Arts a Kirin art exhibition, with Yoshihara serving as a juror.[6] This exhibition was open to elementary and middle school children, as well as preschoolers. The call for applications asked for works in non-figurative or abstract styles, with no restriction on material or size. The result was an exhibition bursting with children's artworks, with the walls covered from floor to ceiling.

Gutai members' interest in contributing art and articles to Kirin waned towards the end of the 1950s. In 1962, after several years of financial distress, Kirin changed publishers.[6] Shortly after, Ukita ceased working for the publication.

Despite Ukita not having any formal artistic training, Yoshihara invited him to join Gutai in 1955. As a founding member of the group, Ukita's first contribution was the lending of his printing press, which was used to make the first edition of the Gutai Journal.[7] As Yoshihara considered the Gutai journal to be foundational to the group's ambitions of being internationally-recognized, Ukita's editing experience was an asset.

Ukita participated in many major Gutai exhibitions, including the Experimental Outdoor Exhibition of Modern Art to Challenge the Mid-Summer Sun in 1955, until his departure from the group in 1964.

At the first outdoor exhibition in 1955, Ukita presented for a minimalist, geometric sculpture. He then experimented in different two-dimensional abstract styles, exposing in 1957 a series of simple, free-hand drawings, and towards 1960 adopted an Informel-style impasto painting technique, exploiting the materiality of oil paint.

Comments made on Ukita's work during his Gutai years evoked the ingenuity of children's art. Yoshihara, writing about the 1st Gutai Art Exhibition at the Ohara Kaikan, described Ukita's compositions as "spontaneous" and "insolent".[8] Fellow Gutai artist Toshio Yoshida praised Ukita's drawings that he said appeared to have been made by a child who held a pencil in his hand for the first time.[9]

Ukita contributed several essays to the Gutai journal on different topics.

In the second Gutai journal, Ukita wrote an article pertaining to the works of Michiko Inui, a sixth-grade student in Higashinariku.[10] Referring to her in the honorific, the essay illustrated his deep respect for her artistic practice, despite her young age. Ukita describes how the girl produced her non-figurative work in almost subconscious state of being. He hypothesized that it was through reaching such a pure state of mind that she was able to produce paintings that could "touch someone's heartstrings".[10] Ukita also surmised that, as long as Michiko could continue painting in such a way, she would become "a great person".[10]

Ukita's reflections upon the 1955 outdoor exhibition appeared in the third edition of the Gutai journal and testified to Gutai's inventive spirit. He explained in straightforward terms that the works presented were not just sculptures, rather they were a means of exploring new aesthetic possibilities.[11]

His essay "The Gutai Chain", published in 1957 in the fourth edition of the Gutai journal, reflects on the importance of individuality within the artistic collective. He spoke of "a single thin, but strong unwasted backbone" that formed the bond between the members.[12] Art historian Ming Tiampo has argued that Ukita "challenged the wartime definition of group and community", proposing a "creative ideal that valued heterogeneity and dissent as a means of strengthening both the individual and the collective".[13]

Ukita stopped painting when he left Gutai, but returned to artmaking towards the end of the 1970s, and began exhibiting his work again after 1983.

A one-year stay in Finland from 1998 to 1999 inspired a new wave of artistic activity.[3] In 1999, he had a solo exhibition at the Värjäämö and Louinais-Hämeen Museum in Forssa.

Ukita's later paintings attest to a playful approach to geometric abstraction. His sober and restricted compositions retain a hand-made quality. In a recent publication on the work of Ukita, the authors express the idea that, throughout his life, children's art remained "the core" of Ukita's creative work.[3]

In 2008, he co-edited a book about Kirin with Mizuho Kato and Yuzo Kurashina, Kirin no ehon [The picture books of Kirin], reproducing many of the magazine's covers.[6] He also maintained the Atelier Ukita in Osaka, his studio, which was open to the public. He died in 2013 in Osaka.

• July 1955 Experimental Outdoor Exhibition of Modern Art to Challenge the Midsummer Sun, Ashiya Park, Ashiya
• October 1955 First Gutai Art Exhibition, Ohara Kaikan, Tokyo
• October 1956 Small Pieces of Gutai Art Exhibition, Sanseidō Gallery, Tokyo
• April 1957 3rd Gutai Art Exhibition, Kyoto City Museum of Art, Kyoto
• October 1957 4th Gutai Art Exhibition, Ohara Kaikan, Tokyo
• April 1958 International Art of a New Era: Informel and Gutai, Takashimaya Department Store, Osaka
• August 1959 8th Gutai Art Exhibition, Kyoto Municipal Museum of Art ; Ohara Kaikan, Tokyo
• March 1961 Continuité et avant-garde au Japon [Continuity and Avant-Garde in Japan], International Center for Aesthetic Research, Turin
• August 1961 10th Gutai Art Exhibition, Takashimaya Department Store, Osaka ; Takishimaya Department Store, Tokyo
• April 1962 11th Gutai Art Exhibition, Takashimaya Department Store, Osaka
• January 1963 12th Gutai Art Exhibition, Takashimaya Department Store, Tokyo
• April 1963 13th Gutai Art Exhibition, Takashimaya Department Store, Osaka
• March 1964 14th Gutai Art Exhibition, Takashimaya Department Store, Osaka

• 1976 Gutai bijutsu no jūhachinen [Eighteen Years of Gutai Art], Osaka Civic Gallery, Osaka
• 1979 Yoshihara Jirō to Gutai no sono go [Yoshihara Jirō and today's aspects of Gutai], Hyogo Prefectural Museum of Modern Art, Kobe
• 1983 Sechs Japanische Künstler der Gutai-Gruppe [Six Japanese artists of the Gutai Group], Atelierhaus Hildebrandstrasse, Düsseldorf
• 1990 Gutai: Mikan no zen'ei shūdan [Gutai: Unfinished Avant-Garde group], Shōtō Museum of Art, Tokyo
• 1990 Giappone Allávanguardea il Gruppo Gutai negle anni Cinquanta [Gutai, 1950s Japanese Avant-garde], Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Moderna, Rome
• 1991 Gutai Japanische Avantgarde / Japanese Avant-garde 1954-1965, Matildenhöhe, Darmstadt
• 1992-1993 Gutai ten I: 1954-1958 [Gutai exhibition I: 1954-1958],  ; Gutai ten II: 1959-1965 [Gutai exhibition II: 1959-1965],  ; Gutai ten III 1966-1972 [Gutai exhibition III: 1966-1972], Ashiya City Museum of Art & History, Ashiya
• 1999 Gutai, Galerie Nationale du Jeu de Paume, Paris
• 2004 The 50th Anniversary of Gutai Retrospective Exhibition, Hyogo Prefectural museum of Art, Kobe
• 2012 GUTAI: The Spirit of an Era, The National Art Center, Tokyo
• 2012 A Visual Essay on Gutai at 32 East 69th Street, Hauser & Wirth, New York
• 2013 Gutai: Splendid Playground, The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York