Yozo Ukita

In 2008, he co-edited a book about Kirin with Mizuho Katō and Yūzō Kurashina, Kirin no ehon [The picture books of Kirin], reproducing many of the magazine's covers.

A one-year stay in Finland from 1998 to 1999 inspired a new wave of artistic activity. In 1999, he had a solo exhibition at the Värjäämö and Louinais-Hämeen Museum in Forssa, Finland.

In 1985, Ukita opened the Atelier Ukita, "a painting class of contemporary art," in Osaka, making it open to the public as "a gathering place where one can see and accept oneself as well as others by making a work." In his own words, "Let us train the core of our heart by making a fun painting (work). Training the core of our heart is the most important task of us humans. So let us study the core of our heart by works we will love. Atelier Ukita is such a place."

Ukita's own artistic practice was prompted by his affiliation with Gutai. His early geometric works were followed by gestural abstraction. He ceased art making when he left Gutai, but resumed it in 1984 by building on his experimentations with abstraction in his early Gutai days. In 1985, he established the Atelier ukita in Osaka, where he shared his serious yet playful creative spirit with adults and children alike.

Ukita stopped painting when he left Gutai in 1964. He returned to artmaking toward the end of the 1970s and began exhibiting his work again after 1983.

His essay "The Gutai Chain," published in 1957 in Gutai 4, reflects on the importance of individuality within the artistic collective. He wrote about "a single thin, but strong unwasted backbone" that formed the bond between the members. Art historian Ming Tiampo has argued that Ukita "challenged the wartime definition of group and community," proposing a "creative ideal that valued heterogeneity and dissent as a means of strengthening both the individual and the collective".

After Ukita joined Gutai in 1955, many Gutai artists, including Atsuko Tanaka, Shōzō Shimamoto, Kazuo Shiraga, Masatoshi Masanobu, Saburō Murakami, Sadamasa Motonaga and Tsuruko Yamazaki, had their artworks featured in Kirin. Ukita also asked his fellow artists to contribute short articles for the young readers. Gutai artists published 60 such articles. They spoke both seriously and playfully about art and creativity, and encouraged children to discover their individuality, as illustrated by Ukita's own short essay "On Being Weird," in which he called on children to embrace that which made them different:

In December 1955, Ukita and several other Gutai artists organized a Kirin art exhibition at the Osaka City Museum of Fine Arts, with Yoshihara serving as a juror. Open to elementary and middle school children, as well as preschoolers, the exhibition called for works in non-figurative or abstract styles, with no restriction on material or size. The result was an exhibition bursting with children's artworks, with the walls covered from floor to ceiling.

Despite Ukita not having any formal art training, Yoshihara invited him to join Gutai in 1955. While some members did have a formal art school education, Ukita was not the only self-taught member. Such inclusion correlated with Gutai's respect for the ingenuity of children's art and is indicative of the group's resistance to the institutional centers of the Japanese art world. As a Gutai member, Ukita's first contribution was to lend his printing press for use in the production of the first issue of the group's journal, Gutai 1. This publication constituted the group's first public collective act, even before the staging of their first exhibition. Ukita's editing experience was also an asset, since Yoshihara considered the Gutai journal to be foundational to the group and its ambitions for international recognition.

Ukita participated in more than ten Gutai exhibitions, beginning with the 1955 show Experimental Outdoor Exhibition of Modern Art to Challenge the Mid-Summer Sun, and concluding when he left Gutai in 1964.

At the first outdoor exhibition in 1955, Ukita presented a minimalist, geometric sculpture. He then experimented with different two-dimensional abstract styles, exhibiting a series of simple, free-hand drawings in 1957, and adopting an Informel-style impasto painting technique that exploited the materiality of oil paint around 1960.

Comments made on Ukita's work during his Gutai years evoked the ingenuity of children's art. Writing about the 1st Gutai Art Exhibition at the Ohara Kaikan in October 1955, Yoshihara described Ukita's compositions as "spontaneous" and "insolent." Fellow Gutai artist Toshio Yoshida praised Ukita's drawings, which he characterized as appearing to have been made by a child holding a pencil in his hand for the first time.

Ukita's reflections upon the 1955 outdoor exhibition, which appeared in Gutai 3, point to Gutai's inventive spirit. In essence, according to him, these outdoor works were not just sculptures as such but a means of exploring new aesthetic possibilities.

Gutai members' interest in contributing art and articles to Kirin waned toward the end of the 1950s. In 1962, after several years of financial distress, Kirin changed publishers. Shortly after, Ukita ceased working for the publication.

Yōzō Ukita was born in Osaka. During the war years, he was drafted to the air force at Kakamigahara in Gifu Prefecture, where he did aircraft maintenance. After the end of his military service, he worked in Osaka for Ozaki Shobō, a publishing company. In 1948, Ukita, Yoshiro Hoshi and Adachi Ken'ichi began to work on Kirin, a new literary magazine for children founded the year before by Iku Takenaka and Yasushi Inoue. Ukita spent his days visiting elementary schools in the Kinki region, speaking with teachers and gathering children's poetry. In the evenings he assembled Kirin in a makeshift office of a small shack.

The editors of Kirin originally asked local artists to produce covers for the magazine. In 1948, Ukita first met Jirō Yoshihara, an Ashiya-based businessman, artist and future leader of Gutai, after asking him to contribute a cover to the magazine. From 1950 onward, children's art would also be used on the cover. Ukita was then tasked with choosing pieces by local children, developing all the while a deep appreciation for their fresh, unexpected and diverse artistic styles.

Yōzō Ukita (浮田要三, Ukita Yōzō, 28 November 1924 - 21 July 2013) was a Japanese artist, educator, writer and editor. Often known as a member of the Gutai Art Association from 1955 to 1964, Ukita made a major contribution in art education for children initially through his editorship of Kirin [Giraffe], a children's magazine that experimented with merging modern art and literature intended to encourage free thinking among children in postwar Japan. His association with Gutai began when he first asked the future leader Jirō Yoshihara to contribute an artwork for the cover of the magazine. Over the years he would ask other Gutai members to also contribute in this way. He thus deepened the relationship between Gutai and children's art, a topic many members were eager to address on the pages of Kirin and elsewhere.