Toshiko Uchima

Uchima was born Toshiko Aohara on October 26, 1918 in Japanese-occupied northeast China and raised in the expatriate Japanese community in Dalian (known to the Japanese as “Dairen”), where she studied drawing and painting at the Dairen Art Studio.[1] After her family returned to Japan in the late 1930’s, she attended Kobe College and studied with the painter Ryōhei Koiso.[1] In the early 1950’s, Uchima, living in Tokyo, exhibited oil paintings at the Yomiuri Independent Show[2] and was one of the first women to join the Democratic Artists Association (Demokrāto),[1] a group of artists in different media founded by noted Japanese avant-garde artist Ei Q. As a member of Demokrāto, she made the acquaintance of, among others, art critic Sadajirō Kubo and poet Shūzō Takiguchi,[3] whose poems, together with a portfolio of original prints, including Uchima’s, appeared in a 1954 limited edition work titled "Sphinx."

In 1955, she married Ansei Uchima, an artist best known as a woodblock printmaker. That year she co-founded, with Chizuko Yoshida, Reika Iwami and others, the Joryū Hanga Kyōkai (Japanese Women’s Print Association). She exhibited in its annual shows from 1956 to 1965.[2] She also exhibited in the Grenchen International Print Biennale in 1958.[2] In 1959, she left Japan with her husband and one-year-old son. The family settled in New York City in 1960.[1] She participated in "Japan’s Modern Prints - Sosaku Hanga," the first comprehensive exhibition of sōsaku hanga from the early twentieth century to the present, in 1960 at the Art Institute of Chicago,[4] and continued to produce prints for several years.

In the mid-1960’s, she turned to collage as a primary medium[1] and, later, also produced box assemblages, using “objects as disparate as antique dolls, postage stamps, seashells, feathers and miniature angelic figures, each with a unique memory and history arranged into a ‘poetic theater’ which tells the story of times gone by and the impermanence of life.” [5] She regularly exhibited her collage and assemblage work in solo and group shows in New York and Japan.

In 1982, her husband suffered a stroke that ended his career. Uchima spent much of her time over the next 18 years caring for him. She continued to produce work in her limited time and exhibited her work throughout the 1980’s and 1990’s. She died on December 18, 2000.[3]

• Brooklyn Museum[6]
• Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Museum, Rutgers University[7]
• Grinnell College Museum of Art[8]
• Nerima Art Museum, Tokyo[2]
• Museum of Modern Art, Wakayama, Japan[2]
• Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art, Japan[2]
• Tochigi Prefectural Museum of Art, Utsunomiya, Japan[2]
• Miyazaki Prefectural Art Museum, Japan[2]
• Museum of Art, Kochi, Japan[2]