Yaya Ueda

Yaya Ueda (born in Osaka Prefecture) is a Japanese contemporary artist whose practice extends print logic — reproduction, indexicality, the relationship between a matrix and its issue — into photography, sculpture, and collaborative work. Alongside her silkscreen and etching production within a wider hybrid practice, she was selected in 2025 for the 4th PATinKyoto (Print Art Triennale in Kyoto), a Japanese print-focused triennale.

Ueda's recent work pivots on a recurring procedure: she fabricates small sculptural objects by hand, photographs them carefully, and then circulates the photographic prints as the public form of the piece. Titles such as 'METAL GLUE (Möbius, Sphere, Square, Mirror)' (2023, inkjet print, 517 × 713 mm) document this method directly — the title names the four sculpted objects, and the print is the issue. The procedure inverts the documentary-photography convention by which a photograph captures a real-world found subject; here the subject is artist-made and therefore exists primarily to be photographed and reissued. Ueda has framed this as an exploration of the boundary between uniqueness and reproducibility — when a sculptural object is fabricated specifically to be printed, which is the work, the sculpture or the print?

Alongside the photographic-print and inkjet output, Ueda also produces silkscreen and etching works, and she collaborates with photographer Shunsuke Kano and artist Teppei Sako in the unit THE COPY TRAVELERS, a collective formed in 2014 that experiments at the intersection of photography, photocopy, and printmaking. The COPY TRAVELERS work circulates as small-edition photo-and-print zines and gallery installations.

Ueda's exhibition history includes 'A Magpie's Nest' at galerie16 (Kyoto, 2018), a 2019 presentation at gallery TOWED (Tokyo), Assembridge Nagoya 2020 at the Minatomachi Potluck Building (Aichi), 'Angel's Perch' at Shibunkaku Ginza (Tokyo, 2023), and 'METAL GLUE / Slow Drawing Garden' at NEW SPACE PA (Tokyo, 2023). Her inclusion in the 4th PATinKyoto ran at the Kyoto City KYOCERA Museum of Art from April 15 to May 11, 2025, on the recommendation of Kenjiro Hosaka, Director of the Shiga Prefectural Museum of Art.

The practice — sculpture, then photograph, then print, with silkscreen and etching channels in parallel — places Ueda within the post-2010 Japanese 'expanded printmaking' tendency, which uses the print exhibition as a sympathetic platform for hybrid-media artists who think through reproduction without committing to a single traditional print technique. Ueda's work is best understood not as conventional intaglio or relief printmaking but as a print-adjacent practice in which the question 'what counts as a print?' is itself the subject.