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Born in 1947 in Hyogo Prefecture, Keiji Uematsu graduated from the department of Fine Arts, Kobe University in 1969 and moved to Germany in 1975. Since 1986 he has resided and worked in both Minoo city, Japan, and Düsseldorf, Germany. Uematsu has exhibited works illustrating relationships between the body and objects, and has pursued strategies to render visible, unseen forces, such as gravity and magnetism, and reveal the underlying structure. The use of natural materials such as wood, stone, fabric, and metal, as well as the fact that his activities were contemporaneous to the prolific artists associated with the movement Mono-ha, give a false notion that his work is also connected to the movement. Instead of attention to the inherent state of natural and industrial materials, and their relation to the environmental space surrounding them, Uematsu’s focus is on expose the structures and relationships of the physical world that may not be visible. Since the 1970s, Uematsu began making film and video works. There were a number of fine artists at the time who took the moving image to create conceptual works. This was not a mere documentation of their performances but a strategy to visualize their practice and process. Within this movement, Uematsu produced important works and presented in the annual fine artists’ moving image exhibition in Tokyo, Exhibition of Contemporary Plastic Art: Expression in Film, as well as broadcast a collaborative work, Image of Image—Seeing with artist Tatsuo Kawaguchi and Saburo Murakami at NHK Kobe. Major solo exhibitions include Relation of Matters (Galerie 16, Kyoto, 1974), Keiji Uematsu: Skulptur Foto Video Film (Moderna Museet Stockholm, 1976-77), Series, Today’s Artist, Installation and Photo (Osaka Contemporary Art Center, 1981), Keiji Uematsu: eyes under physical consideration - photographs, videos and films 1972-2003 (Kitakyushu Municipal Museum of Art, Fukuoka, 2003), and Keiji Uematsu: The Garden of Time (Otani Memorial Art Museum, Nishinomiya City, Hyogo, 2006). Major group exhibitions include Photography in Contemporary Art (The National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo, and elsewhere, 1983-84), the 43rd Venice Biennale, Japan Pavilion (1988), and Performing for the Camera (Tate Modern, London, 2016).
