Medium: hand cut black paper By Kako Ueda
Eurocentric culture often conceptualizes the body as a machine. And yet, the body can also be understood as an ecosystem. Like a garden, cultivating a healthy body and mind requires balance, much like the idea of yin and yang.
This piece is currently on view at the NYU Langone Hospital Art Gallery (550 First Avenue, NYC), a group show entitled “In the Deep Heart’s Core”, curated by Katherine Meehan (from Jan. 24 – April 26, 2019).
Originally from Tokyo, Kako Ueda has made her home in Brooklyn, NY since 1996. In 1999, she was awarded a MFA from Pratt Institute. Her cut paper series started in 2003 and since then, she has been making works with this medium as well as with other mediums such as drawing, painting, collage and at times, all of them combined. She has shown her work both internationally and throughout the United States at places such as Kiasma, the contemporary art museum in Helsinki, Finland and the Museum of Arts and Design, NYC. The main theme of her art is a shifting and blurring border between culture and nature, their positive and negative impact on each other. She also takes a keen interest in the hybridization of culture, identity and species in our imagination as well as in reality that has been happening in an ever accelerating speed in the 21st century.
