Kana Ueda

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 into the major Kansai contemporary-art venues. The 2023 solo show HUMANKIND at Gallery Nomart (Osaka), her primary commercial gallery, was followed by Image Schema at VOU (Kyoto). In 2024 she presented at the Kyoto International Photography Festival's KG+ program, with her #illusion series shown at MOGANA in Kyoto. The 2025 KG+ exhibition Hiroki Kondo / Kana Ueda / kanamaru. extended her presentation, and she was selected for the 4th PATinKyoto Kyoto Print Triennial 2025 — where she received the Grand Prize, the most significant Japanese print honor a younger artist can receive.

The winning of the PATinKyoto Grand Prize in 2025 places Ueda at the front 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 selected exhibitions also include the Nakanojo Biennale (Gunma Prefecture) and WHAT CAFE (Tennozu, Tokyo) appearances. She is represented by Gallery Nomart in Osaka, founded by Hayashi Satoshi (1924–2024), one of the senior figures of the Kansai contemporary print establishment.

Ueda's practice is unusual in its explicit engagement with mirror-based silkscreen printing, an unusual 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 contemporaries like Ryoji Ikeda — Ueda is producing physical printed objects that respond to digital interface artifacts, rather than producing digital data art directly.