Art Diary

May 14, 2014

Shoko Uemura – Too much fun with flowers and birds

Jitsuko Ogura, Principal Investigator, The National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto

Shoko Uemura was a painter who practiced his art through three imperial periods in Japan (1902-2001). His mother, Shoen Uemura, was also a painter. Shoko loved to draw since he was a young child and trained at the Kyoto City University of Arts, furthering his education in the Faculty of Arts at the same university. The combination of his own interest and his mother's influence naturally led him on the path to becoming a painter. However, his mother never showed Shoko how she painted or techniques for painting. Instead, he learned to distinguish the quality of artwork from his mother's passing comments, which she made when antique store owners visited her, or when she leafed through a catalogue.

Shoko also loved watching goldfish and small birds when he was young. A six-year old Shoko was amazed by the beautiful scene created when a sparrow flew out of its cage and landed on a Japanese maple tree, full of fresh, green leaves. Shoko recounted that this was the event that drew him to the beauty of flowers and birds. He made flowers and birds a central theme of his life's work, and thus began to walk a path that was different from his mother's. Just as the mother focused her paintings on refined images of women, Shoko pursued the refined image of birds and was awarded the Order of Cultural Merit in 1984 — just as his mother had been awarded the same Order of Merit, Shoko had come to master his own, unique path.

Featured at the National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto are an overwhelming display of approximately 70 works of art, including "Brilliant Rain," based on tropical birds, "Crane," surpassing past works, and "Peacock," as well as the works he entered into his first big exhibition at the age of 19 entitled "Quiet Garden Welcoming Autumn" and "Night Heron," for which he received the Minister of Education Award for Fine Arts for "harmonizing the traditions and reformation of Japan." The collection also features a rare portrait painting for someone focused on birds and flowers, such as "Spring of a Thousand Leaves" and the sketches included with the book Princess Nukata by Yasushi Inoue. It is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to see these works of art and a glimpse at the secrets of an artist at work. Wouldn't you like to come spend a moment among the brilliant, blooming flowers, on a sea of green grass, surrounded by the playful chirping of birds?