Fifty Years with Woodblock and Collage, from Tokyo to New York

Ansei Uchima (1921–2000, U.S. citizen) was born to Okinawan parents who had emigrated to the United States. After spending his boyhood in Los Angeles, he came to Japan in 1940 and studied architecture at Waseda University. He remained in Tokyo during the war and, in the postwar years, encountered the woodblock prints of Kōshirō Onchi and Shikō Munakata. This experience inspired him to begin working in woodblock printmaking. After returning to the United States in 1959 , he continued to work primarily in New York. In the late 1970s, he developed his “color-field weaving” technique, based on ukiyo-e printmaking methods. His vibrant Forest Byobu series earned him particular acclaim, and he continued to pursue his art with great vitality until illness forced him to stop in 1982. Toshiko Uchima (1918–2000, née Aohara) was raised in Dalian and moved to Kobe in 1935 . She studied painting with Ryōhei Koiso and, in 1953, joined the avant-garde “Democrat Artists Association (Demokrato)” led by Ei-Q and others. During this period, her acquaintance with Sadajirō Kubo and Shūzō Takiguchi encouraged her to create abstract oil paintings and woodblock prints. In 1959, she moved to the United States with her husband, Ansei. From the late 1960s onward, she began to produce unique collages and boxtype assemblages filled with a poetic sensibility. Her extraordinary journey deserves renewed attention today. Focusing primarily on prints and collages, this exhibition revisits the rich and distinctive creative worlds of both artists. In 2014, a retrospective of Ansei was held at the Okinawa Prefectural Museum & Art Museum, but this exhibition marks the first opportunity to retrace the path of Toshiko’s career from her early years to her later life. Here, we re-examine the achievements of both artists, who played important roles in artistic creation as well as in connecting Japanese and American cultural circles during the postwar years. Shown together with works by related artists including Isamu Noguchi and Saburō Hasegawa, their contributions reveal a new perspective on postwar art.