Biography
Yaya Ueda (born in Osaka Prefecture; birth year not publicly disclosed) 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 performance. She is included in batch-06 on the basis of her active silkscreen and etching production within a wider hybrid practice and her 2025 selection for the 4th PATinKyoto Print Art Triennale, the principal Japanese print-focused triennial.
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 x 713 mm) document this method directly — the title names the four sculpted objects, 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 in interviews 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-print 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 long-running collective 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), 'Space-Linked Shallow Machine' at gallery TOWED (Tokyo, 2019), 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 2025 inclusion in the 4th PATinKyoto at the Kyoto City KYOCERA Museum of Art runs from April 15 to May 11, 2025.
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 show as a sympathetic exhibition platform for hybrid-media artists who think through reproduction without committing to a single traditional print technique. Her PATinKyoto recommender is Tsuya Akihiko (curator). 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.
Key Facts
- Nationality
- 🇯🇵Japan
- Movement
- Contemporary Mokuhanga
- Subjects
- Geometric
- Works Indexed
- 1
Frequently Asked Questions
Yaya Ueda (born in Osaka Prefecture; birth year not publicly disclosed) 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 performance. She is included in batch-06 on the basis of her active silkscreen and etching production within a wider hybrid practice and her 2025 selection for the 4th PATinKyoto Print Art Triennale, the principal Japanese print-focused triennial.
Yaya 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.
Yaya Ueda's prints frequently feature geometric.