Tokio Ueyama: The Hollows Between Mountains

Tokio Ueyama: The Hollows Between Mountains centers on the work of Japanese artist Tokio Ueyama (1889–1954), who was based in Los Angeles’s Little Tokyo. Academically trained as a plein air painter, Ueyama remained active throughout the interwar period and during his incarceration in a World War II camp, painting landscapes, portraits, and still lifes. This presentation marks the first museum exhibition in California dedicated to his work.

Drawing from Ueyama’s archive and personal art collection, the exhibition examines the artist’s critical reception, travels, and friendships to trace the convergence of diverse artistic currents—including Impressionism, modern photography, Japanese yōga, and Mexican muralism—in his practice and in the cultural milieu of Little Tokyo. To reconstruct Ueyama’s expansive artistic network, his works are presented alongside drawings, prints, photographs, and paintings by artists he collected, exhibited with, and championed, including Diego Rivera, Tōyō Miyatake, Edward Weston, and Henrietta Shore.

The exhibition also explores the politics, bicultural outlook, and interdisciplinary vision of the Japanese artist collective Shaku-Do-Sha, which Ueyama cofounded with the poet Boshicho Okamura and other Japanese artists after settling in Little Tokyo in 1922. Borrowed from Okamura’s poetry, the exhibition’s subtitle evokes the generative spaces between artistic disciplines, world wars, and empires—the interstitial terrain in which Ueyama and the Japanese diaspora forged new cultural and artistic identities.

In addition to Ueyama’s body of work, the exhibition features selected works by Mabel Alvarez, Alson Skinner Clark, Taizo Kato, Asahachi Kōno, Paul Landacre, Barse Miller, Tōyō Miyatake, Hanson Duvall Puthuff, John Hubbard Rich, Arthur Grover Rider, Diego Rivera, Henrietta Shore, William Wendt, and Edward Weston.

Credit: Exhibition overview from museum website

Image credit: Tokio Ueyama, At Santa Anita (The Evacuee), 1942. Oil on canvas, 24 x 30 ¼ in. Courtesy Japanese American National Museum: Gift of Kayoko Tsukada, 92.20.3. © Estate of Tokio Ueyama