Beautiful Noise – Sour Harvest

Opening Night of ‘Beautiful Noise’ & ‘Chasing The Current’

The opening night of Yosuke Ueno’s ‘Beautiful Noise’ and Ariel DeAndre’s ‘Chasing the Current’ was filled with lots of familiar faces. Both artists’ work is inspired by the Japanese religion of Shinto that is based in details and appreciation of nature. Take some time to stroll about our gallery taking in the detail of these rich and beautiful paintings. Also don’t forget to catch up on our interviews with Yosuke Ueno and Ariel DeAndrea.

Both shows are on view till June 13th.
For more details please visit the Thinkspace Gallery website.

You can view all the photos from the opening reception on Flickr or Facebook.
Above photos and all opening night photography is by photographer Sam Graham.

Yosuke Ueno’s “Beautiful Noise” Highlight on Hi-Fructose

Hi-Fructose stopped by our opening last Saturday for Yosuke Ueno’s “Beautiful Noise” and wrote a great review of the work on their website. “Beautiful Noise” is on view till June 13. Don’t miss the work of Ariel DeAndrea in our project room as well.

“Ueno’s main concept, “Love, Space and Positive Energy,” feels revived in all aspects of his exhibition; an alternate reality characterized by the bold “noise” of popular culture where medium is as important as the message.” – Caro for Hi-Fructose

Interview with artist Yosuke Ueno for ‘Beautiful Noise’

An interview with artist Yosuke Ueno for his upcoming show ‘Beautiful Noise’ at Thinkspace Gallery. The opening reception for ‘Beautiful Nosie’ is Saturday, May 23, and is on view till June 13.

SH: Can you share with us something that scares you and something that makes you really happy?
YU: Recently I recognized that the happiest thing is simple like, living with delicious meals, and good sleep in a comfortable bed. Since I found that, I can always feel happy whether it is rain or shine. What always scare me are people with no imagination.

SH: Favorite food after a long day or night of painting?
YU: Everything my wife cooks for me.

SH: What is your creative process? How long does it take to finish an average painting?
YU: Whatever and whenever I create, time which I spent for a work is whole my life. So if I finish a painting today, I can say it takes 37 years and 11month to do this piece.

SH: Are you a cat or dog person?
YU: I like both. I always try not to belong any “groups.”

SH: Your work is extremely colorful. On average how many different paint colors do you use?
YU: I’ve never counted how many paint colors I use when I paint. However, I am always really concern with where to put colors, because color layout is one of most important things in my artworks. The better the colors go together, the more colorful the work looks. For example, it is sometimes said that girls I depict have rainbow color hairs, but I use only four colors to paint those colorful hair girls.

SH: Do you have a favorite paint brand and brush right now?
YU: The brand is not a matter for me. Any brushes improve with use. For me, price of tools are not important at all.

SH: Your characters’ hair are often colored like a rainbow and your work features repeating words and acronyms throughout. Please explain the symbolic significance of these for those not already familiar with your work and the vast visual keys that each piece contain.
YU: I love science and it is a good inspiration for me, because phenomenon of science happens to everyone equally regardless of race, religion, or sex. I often put an acronym ATGC in my works. The ATGC means four bases of DNA: Adenine, Thymine, Guanine and Cytosine. In my opinion, the ATGC is a symbol of peace because all animate being shares the molecular elements. I think we are not usually aware of what important for our life because of that’s simplicity. I use some motifs repeatedly to remind those simple but important things.*

SH: What is the main inspiration behind your upcoming show, Beautiful Noise?
YU:I can say my hobby is to think. So I’m always thinking about things all the time while I am awake. However, those that I always think about are not enough to be called philosophy, and I call those as noise in my mind. I think my duty is to output those noises into my artworks. Beautiful Noise, it’s a title for works come up with noises in my mind.

SH: How many cups of coffee or tea do you drink a day?
YU: The first thing I do in the morning is to fill my Thermos with coffee by milling the beans by myself.

SH: When did you know / decide to be a professional artist?
YU: When I was seven. The reason was that my friends enjoyed cartoons I drew.

SH: What advice would you give a new artist who looks up to you?
YU: I have no idea now…let me think about that until next time.

SH: Any other toy / figure projects you can share that are coming up on the horizon?
YU: Well, I can’t announce it yet, but one character shown in this show would come up with a figure in the Christmas season. Stay tuned!

SH: Star Wars or Star Trek?
YU: I can’t discuss Star Wars without watching the triptych that is going to be released hereafter, and neither can I discuss Star Trek because there’re too much Star Trek series and I haven’t watched those enough to talk something about it. Maybe I will be like 60 years old when I can speak something about it.

*For more information on the meaning behind the symbols used in Yosuke’s work, please visit his website .

Yosuke Ueno – Beautiful Noise

Yosuke Ueno – ‘Beautiful Noise’
Opening Reception with Artist: Saturday May 23, 6-9pm
May 23rd – June 13th

Thinkspace is pleased to present Beautiful Noise, the gallery’s fourth solo exhibition for Japanese artist Yosuke Ueno. A self-taught painter, Ueno has been creating fantastic worlds and characters as long as he can remember. Highly stylized and beautifully imaginative, his works are surreal and emotional; an alternate reality expressed through a quasi-mythological orbit of his own making. Like tightly knit universes unto themselves, his bizarre and wonderfully unhinged worlds feature a recurring cast of characters and repeated motifs. An intensely emotive painter who, by his own admission, allows his cathartic approach to dictate the development of his works as they’re made, Ueno’s take on pop surrealism is at times explosive and at others meditative, but is consistently seeking the reconciliation of darkness and whimsy.

Inspired by Japanese graphic cultures such as manga and anime, and drawing on the unique stylization of Japanese street fashion, Ueno’s graphic paintings are galvanized by his love of visual culture. Channeling both anger and optimism in the creation of his creatures and surreal landscapes, he seeks the transformation of the negative by invoking hope and positivity through his imagery, even when it betrays trauma and distress in equal parts. Ueno approaches painting as a communicative conduit, and as something powerfully invested with the capacity to make people feel. Because of this implicit responsibility, he has actively sought love and redemption in his imagery rather than indulging in destruction and sadness. Painting is a process of discovery for Ueno, one that he likens to scientific experimentation and unknown variables. He allows his paintings to evolve intuitively, not knowing what the end result will be.

His interest in striking a balance between light and dark imagery is immediately apparent in some of his more recent works. These manage to reconcile the suggestion of sweetness and innocence with the presence of something more sinister and foreboding. Wide-eyed, plushy, rainbow-colored characters are offset by skulls and abject anatomical references, and cotton candy landscapes are punctuated by the suggestion of something harder and menacing, or deeply melancholic. Despite a recurring invocation of love and hope that verges at times on a plea, the works clearly convey the coexistence of often irreconcilable oppositions. Ueno has spoken openly about how his work and imagery were greatly affected by the earthquake, and resulting Tsunami, that devastated Japan in 2011; an event that has left an indelible trauma on its culture. His work, following this tragedy, became less about his omission of negativity, and more about his attempt to summon love and hope in its midst.

The multiplicity of characters in Ueno’s works, and there are over a thousand, hails from the artist’s connection to Japanese Shinto; the polytheistic spiritual tradition in Japan that reveres the greatness in all small things in nature, and seeks the presence of the divine in the minute. In this belief system, there are millions of individual god figures, a veritable plethora of characters and personified energies for even the smallest of natural elements. Each individual part is as important as the whole. This spiritual pluralism is woven throughout Ueno’s work, as the artist builds complex symbolic systems, holistic worlds and recurring metaphors to reinvent a personal spiritual iconography.

Yosuke Ueno’s works, though beautiful, contemporary and graphic, are loaded with a symbolism that betrays the artist’s deeper spiritual connection to making. Giving his imagination free rein to create on impulse, Ueno builds a surreal cosmos with infinite possibilities.

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