Biography
Kana Ueda (born 1988, Hyōgo Prefecture) is a Japanese printmaker whose practice extends silkscreen and photography into a sustained interrogation of the digital image. She first trained in fashion design at Central Saint Martins (London), graduating with a BA (Hons) in Fashion Design Womenswear in 2012, then returned to Japan and completed the Fine Art and Craft (Printmaking) course at Osaka College of Art in 2019. The double background — luxury commercial fashion at one end, traditional Japanese printmaking at the other — has shaped her work as one of the more conceptually loaded entries in younger Kansai-region print practice.
Ueda's central project is the #illusion series. She captures the brief blurred placeholder image that appears on Instagram while a post is loading — a low-resolution, content-empty frame that exists for the user only as a glimpse — and prints these blurred images on mirror surfaces using silkscreen. The result is a print that the viewer can only see properly by also seeing themselves; her own description, that the work explores how unclear visual perception may allow viewers to see what they wish to see, treats the loading-screen image as a contemporary equivalent of the camera obscura or Rorschach blot. The 2022 work #幻影 #illusion #lookmeintheeyes (silkscreen and mirror, 800 × 800 mm) is the canonical example.
Her exhibition record from 2023 forward has placed her among the major Kansai contemporary-art venues. The 2023 solo show HUMANKIND at Gallery Nomart (Osaka) was followed by image schema at VOU (Kyoto), and in 2024 she held further solo exhibitions, including reflective diary at toberu (Kyoto) and that-is-about-to-appear at MOGANA. In 2025 she was selected for the 4th PATinKyoto Kyoto Print Art Triennale, held at the Kyoto City KYOCERA Museum of Art, where she was awarded the Grand Prize — a significant honour for a younger printmaker.
The PATinKyoto Grand Prize places Ueda among the leading figures of the post-2010 Japanese print generation. Her practice — silkscreen on mirror, photography of digital placeholder images, video work, and concept-driven installations — extends contemporary print into image-network, interface, and identity-of-the-viewer territory that very few of her Japanese peers have engaged with directly.
Her work has also appeared at WHAT CAFE in Tennozu, Tokyo. She is represented by Gallery Nomart in Osaka, the contemporary gallery founded in 1989 by Hayashi Satoshi (d. 2024), a senior figure of the Kansai contemporary print establishment.
Ueda's practice is unusual in its explicit engagement with mirror-based silkscreen printing, a technical channel that requires careful handling of opaque inks on reflective glass substrates. Within contemporary Japanese print her work signals a turn toward digital-image and platform-aware practice that runs parallel to (but distinct from) the data-art lineage of artists like Ryoji Ikeda — Ueda is producing physical printed objects that respond to digital interface artifacts, rather than producing digital data art directly.
Key Facts
- Active Period
- 1988
- Nationality
- 🇯🇵Japan
- Movement
- Contemporary Mokuhanga
- Subjects
- Silkscreen
- Works Indexed
- 3
Frequently Asked Questions
Kana Ueda (born 1988, Hyōgo Prefecture) is a Japanese printmaker whose practice extends silkscreen and photography into a sustained interrogation of the digital image. She first trained in fashion design at Central Saint Martins (London), graduating with a BA (Hons) in Fashion Design Womenswear in 2012, then returned to Japan and completed the Fine Art and Craft (Printmaking) course at Osaka College of Art in 2019. The double background — luxury commercial fashion at one end, traditional Japanese printmaking at the other — has shaped her work as one of the more conceptually loaded entries in younger Kansai-region print practice.
Kana Ueda was active born in 1988. They were associated with the Contemporary Mokuhanga movement.
Kana Ueda's work was shaped by the Contemporary Mokuhanga tradition in Japanese woodblock printmaking. Contemporary Mokuhanga: Contemporary mokuhanga (literally "wood-block print") encompasses artists working from approximately 1970 to the present who continue or reinvent traditional Japanese woodblock printing techniques.
Kana Ueda's prints frequently feature silkscreen.
