PRESENTATION: Yuichiro Ukai

Yuichiro Ukai, a member of the renowned Yamanami workshop in Japan, is a passionate illustrator: he strives to draw, from memory, characters from the manga world, etchings, and from encyclopedic works on Reptiliomorpha. These serials or polyptych drawings, often overloaded and of a breathtaking precision, are singularly reminiscent of the triptychs of the Flemish primitive, Jérôme Bosch.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Venus Over Manhattan Gallery Archive

Yukiko Koide in his first solo exhibition in New York presents 14 new works that follow a recent acquisition of his work by the American Folk Art Museum in New York. Yuichiro Ukai is a celebrated self-taught artist, who lives and works in the Shiga prefecture of Japan. Following his graduation from high school in 2014, Ukai became a member of the distinguished Atelier Yamanami. Yamanami functions as a live-work facility that offers employment, training, and arts enrichment programs for individuals with neurodiversity or disabilities. Yamanami has provided the ideal environment and support required for Ukai’s art practice to flourish. Ukai’s compositions teem with activity. His unique visual language evokes both traditions of rather contemporary subculture such as manga and anime, and of the Japanese epic. Drawn on sequential sheets of brown paper, the incredibly dense images are built from memory to create a visual assemblage of seemingly eclectic characters. The artist incorporates a broad array of forms and figures from popular Japanese culture (samurai, yokai-monsters, Pokémon, and skeletons), but also includes his encyclopedic explorations of insects, dinosaurs, and popular icons into each frame. These phantasmagoric drawings are done in a sequential series, but executed with what seems to be complete improvisation. The result is an impossibly rich and almost cartographic landscape of a world that pulled from Ukai’s imaginative references. Melding traditional allusions—to the idiom of Ukiyo-e prints, Japanese mythology, and folklore—with more modern emblems allows these works to poetically engage Japanese Art historical and cultural references while simultaneously situating themselves in the present. Japanese subculture and epics, two influences heavily present in Ukai’s work, are both integral parts of Japan’s literary and visual arts heritage. The heightened sense of drama, expansiveness of scope and rich complexity present in Ukai’s drawings are very evocative of Japanese epics, which often take the form of long narrative poems or prose works that depict heroic tales, historical events, or legendary figures. Correspondingly, manga, which can trace its roots to traditional Japanese art forms like ukiyo-e woodblock prints, is a sequential art, characterized by its distinctive visual style and narrative structure – something echoed in the continuity preternaturally conjured by Ukai across his drawings.

Photo: Yuichiro Ukai, Untitled (No. 51), 2022. Colored pencil, marker and ink on card-board; 29 x 32 1/2 in (73.7 x 82.5 cm). Courtesy the artist, Yukiko Koide Pre-sents, and Venus Over Manhattan, New York

Info: Venus Over Manhattan, 39 Great Jones Street, New York, NY, USA, Duration: 17/11/2023-13/1/2024, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 11:00-18:00, www.venusovermanhattan.com/