Ueshima Museum Through The Eyes of Yuko Hasegawa: Between Forms and Substance, Ontology and Epistemology

A new museum in Shibuya

The distinctive characteristic of the Ueshima Collection, founded by Kankuro Ueshima, is that it is primarily composed of paintings, the majority of which are abstract. The collection, accumulated over two years, currently consists of 700 works created between the 1990s and 2024 (as of June 2024).

The Ueshima Museum, standing on the grounds of the former British School of Shibuya Kyoiku Gakuen and housing the Ueshima Collection, opened its doors on June 1, 2024. The first collection exhibition features 74 works displayed over six floors, each dedicated to a specific theme.

It is often a challenge for collectors to see their entire collection in one place. Thus, Ueshima continues to collect rapidly, with the full extent of his collection only visible in the data form. Ueshima also played the leading role in the curation of this exhibition, joined by Yukie Kamiya and Junya Yamamine as advisors in planning, selecting works, and exhibition composition. It is fair to say that the works selected for the first exhibition are representative of the Ueshima Collection.

A mixture of speed and delay: the betrayal and formation of image

The room on the second floor was the most thrilling, depicting both the betrayal and the creation of the image.

Throughout the exhibition, the intensity and speed of Ueshima’s intuition in connecting the “current” and the “presence of the work” are evident. This approach perceives the rich space that emerges from frustration, delay, and ambiguity of paintings that contain hidden information and uncapturable phenomena as “contemporaneity.”

The Gerhard Richter solo exhibition Ueshima saw in New York in 2016 was the catalyst for his strong interest in contemporary art, and Abstract Sketch (1991) is an essential work, as it is the first piece of art purchased by Ueshima. As the description on the website states, this work is closely related to the “Photo Painting” series, and within the abstract image, we can recognize vertical lines and green hills. Richter’s experimental spirit, which seeks to reach beyond the human hand (artificiality and intention) to the entirely incomprehensible, reached its climax in the abstract squeegee paintings of the 1990s. 

“Abstract paintings are always understood as depictions of something. In other words, they are illustrating something. (...) Almost automatically, we seek out similarities with scenes from real life. In this suggestive way, paintings (images) convey a certain atmosphere or message.” Richter says that when he puts squeegee paintings or thick brush strokes on the canvas, it is not the materiality he focuses on but the image. It is the “image” that he refers to when describing a painting as “shine.” The meaning of Richter’s “image” becomes clear with the three works in the collection and on display, including 4. 3. 89 (1989) from the “Overpainted Photograph” series, which features photographs painted with oil, and a unique photographic piece that captures abstract painting, Untitled (3.11.89) (1989). Richter’s attitude of continually betraying the creation of the image, and thereby using the audience as a medium to generate an “image,” is one of the canons of this collection. Lined up on the same floor, Andreas Gursky’s black zip, Theaster Gates’ vertical floorboards, and other works also seem to resonate with it. 

Digital rehabilitation of regressed perception

The outstanding works are determined by the age in which the artist lived and the opposing tensions. 

The centrifugal force of images can be comforting, as we are exposed to a flood of images in the media and through social networks. Abstract paintings (non-representational paintings) are playing their role here. Most of the abstract paintings in the collection are multi-layered: we see Katharina Grosse’s works expand into multiple spaces and Lauren Quin embedding multiple references of works from the past, like a computer infrastructure. It is not an appropriation or pastiche of meaning but a mixture of information/meaning that relentlessly enters our memory, layering without time to settle into the grid of “perception.”

All-over entanglement space is “the flatbed picture plane” (Leo Steinberg), similar to the horizontality created by Jackson Pollock’s auto-descriptive pouring. Yet, it differs from an in-depth picture space, as it is a picture space without depth. Tangled like palpable matter, it is a visual-tactile sensation of noise, bugs, and glitches that unfold in the digital world and a movement of lines and touches that protrude into our space.

The works of Bernard Friz and Kenjiro Okazaki’s Thumbnails series further emphasize the “lack of depth.” The pieces exist and become possible due to the tension and gravity of the medium (paint) as a material on a flat surface. They are exhibited as an epilogue in the basement and ground floor.

Back and forth between entropy and negentropy, noise and vibe

Works in non-painting media are also subject to a consistent concept. Mika Tajima’s Negative Entropy (Stripe International Inc., Legal Department, Black and White, Hex) (2021) incorporates spectrogram images of environmental sounds recorded at specific locations and woven into a textile using the Jacquard loom. The work represents a process of converting sound into a material form, which links to the work of Ryoji Ikeda, who visualizes data and brings invisible and diverse materiality into the realm of epistemology. 

The similarities and differences between the light that vibrates through fluorescent tubes, as in Dan Flavin’s work, and the neons of Theaster Gates, which contain socio-political messages, become apparent. The magnetic field causes the world to lose its color. It is rather intriguing that it is not Olafur Eliasson’s colorful works combining dichroic filters that are chosen but rather a room that serves as a device for reducing perception to a single color. The denial of color guides our perception and bodies to the vibrations of space.

Here, works with slightly different parameters in terms of form and content, as well as the noise and vibe that permeates the surrounding space, are blended to form a collection space.

The environmental noise of modern society manifests itself in psychological impacts, such as temptation, desire, and anger. While adopting a punk, obscene, personal perspective, Tracey Emin infiltrates people’s “psyche.” The purity of Virgil Abloh and Takashi Murakami’s collaboration is established within a fine line of contemporary proximity. The collaboration between Abloh, who has elevated street art to a level of elegance, and Murakami, who has transformed tacky kitsch into authentic form, is a prime example of this.

As for NFTs that ubiquitously float in the digital environment, this exhibition featured Matter is Void - Fire (2022), the first NFT work by the teamLab collective. The work generates and changes three-dimensional letters, but only the owner has the right to modify the statement irreversibly.

The forms and meanings arising from ambiguous situations

In the ambiguous and uncertain context of the present, the collection reflects Ueshima’s questioning of the wavering situation between epistemology and ontology and whether ontology ought to be sought in the physical materiality of the body, or in the images, actions, and environments created through digital technology.

Capturing invisible things and noise, sensing ambient frequencies in the surrounding area, and incorporating them into the “gravity” of the expression. Even if imperfect and naive, the artists explore and draw something out of the world. Perhaps the best example of this exploration was the exhibition on the 3rd and 5th floors featuring Japanese female artists. While the styles varied from surrealism (Kei Imazu) and naive (Makiko Kudo) to abstract (Yoko Matsumoto), it is clear that the artists attempted to find a form that balances the current state of anxiety.

There is a feeling of calm and consolation balanced with anxiety. Yet, it exists within a sense of tension, as at any moment, that balance could be disrupted or fall apart. Matsumoto, whose acclaim is rising overseas, does not pre-determine the composition but instead creates the image by playing with the shapes appearing on the canvas. Unlike Claude Monet, the world she sees does not extend beyond the canvas; the ephemeral scene appears within the frame. A new sense of tension is created on canvas by incorporating verticality reminiscent of Barnett Newman and Robert Motherwell, with the gravity of green and blue colors and the pink and gray cloud-like touches that diffuse in multiple directions.

Unlike the era of Monet, the air and space of our world are polluted with digital signals and viruses. This collection exhibition offers a different take on abstract art, one that is distinct from abstract expressionism and passionate abstract art from the post-World War I and post-World War II periods. This is complemented and strengthened by the works of artists who express magnetic force, noise, and vibration through mediums beyond the form of painting. With a similar internal urgency, Ueshima is attempting to visualize the ream and grasp the strategies of artists who attempt to traverse and connect environments that divide ontology, epistemology, and perception through the layers of abstract movement as entanglement, interaction, and vibration.

Another series of works that respond to Richter’s “image” and the shine from the paintings is the series of photographs of modernist architecture by Hiroshi Sugimoto, displayed on each floor. The signs of modernity, rationality, and utopia implied in the out-of-focus screen and the light emanating from it provoke new interpretations in the viewer and challenge the mechanisms of perception.

*──“Conversation with Gerhard Richter and Dieter Schwarz” Gerhard Richter: Exhibition Catalogue, pp.221 (Japanese only)
Original interview: Dietmar Elger, ed., “Gerhard Richter / Dieter Schwarz, Ein Gespräch / An Interview” (Cologne: Walther König, 2019)