Painters work in the moment. They choose a subject — a flower, a face, a landscape — and capture it in real time. They create snapshots, in a way, of whatever they were seeing or thinking about when they took their brush to canvas.
But when we look at the work later, years into the future, we see more than that instant. We view every painting within the context of the artist’s entire life, the ups and downs of their careers, the social circumstances of the age in which they created, and within the frame of art history.
All of that plays out in the exhibit “The Life and Art of Tokio Ueyama,” which opened last week at the Denver Art Museum. The 40 paintings and drawings on display are solid examples of the soft-edged representational style common in the first half of the 20th century.
Ueyama used oil on canvas, and charcoal on paper, the preferred tools of his era, to capture scenes of farms, hillsides and architecture, to make portraits of people he knew and postcards of places he visited.
They were moments in his time and, perhaps, unremarkable in the scheme of whatever criteria we use to judge the merits of art.
Though in our time they take on an almost overpowering poignancy. Because we see them — thanks to this rich exhibition — as the products of something larger. Ueyama created many of them while incarcerated in the concentration camps where Japanese-Americans were forced to reside during World War II, when the U.S. and the country of Japan were in a dark conflict.
And so the paintings are revealed to be much more than they appear on the surface, as the product of just one of many dedicated painters. They are symbols of perseverance and hope, a peek into the human mind and how it copes with oppression, a testament to the power of art to teach history in a way that books, lectures and even personal testimony cannot. That is a lot to say about a handful of paintings, but it feels true.
“The Life and Art of Tokio Ueyama” — organized by DAM’s Western American Art curator JR Henneman — uses a small amount of raw material to tell a big story, and this particular narrative has local connections.
Ueyama was born in 1889 in Japan and emigrated to the U.S. in 1908 at the age of 18. He attended the University of Southern California, earning a degree in fine arts in 1914.
He lived, worked, exhibited and traveled widely. He married another Japanese immigrant, Suyeko “Suye” Tsukada, along the way.
Then, in 1941, Tokio and Suye were among the 120,000 Japanese people in the U.S. who were deemed, without cause, as dangers to the country and forced into makeshift prisons. They were, as the exhibition text bluntly puts it, “forcibly removed from their home in southern California and sent to the Granada Relocation Center, now known as the Amache National Historic Site, in southeast Colorado.”
Despite the upheaval and, no doubt, the trauma, Tokio Ueyama continued to paint. He captured scenes of the camp and its surroundings and inhabitants. He taught art classes to his fellow prisoners.
The exhibition includes work by Ueyama before and after this chapter, but it is impossible not to look at the paintings he made between 1942 and 1945 through a different lens, one that pulls back and considers what he was seeing, and contemplating, during this dark chapter of American history.
An otherwise ordinary 1943 still life, depicting a large green squash, some dried ears of corn, and a camping lantern transforms into evidence of how Amache residents grew their own food to better their diet.
A pastoral scene from 1944, of buildings and a forlorn playground with a basketball hoop, becomes a document of how these captives lived in identical barracks and passed idle time.
Without the backstory, a 1941 portrait of a woman sitting in a chair, knitting in the afternoon sun, would appear gentle and serene. But we see those barracks in the background, and the dry and inhospitable earth that surrounds her environment and we know now, in the present, that it was not her choice to be there.
The drama that accompanies viewing these scenes is undeniable, though it derives from what the viewer brings to the experience rather than what Ueyama, who died in 1954, painted onto canvas.
They are notably straightforward, remarkable in their ordinariness, considering what was going on in the world. This is not a painter in the act of protest; rather, it is a human in the act of practicing his art. If Ueyama had a message with this work, some extreme intent, it was concerned with exploring light, shadow and color, about freezing mood, venturing into the soul of people and nature.
It would be easy to extrapolate that calm, honest sensibility these works imbue into something grander, to see it as an effort by an artist to noble-ize camp life, to depict people keeping their chins up and their houses clean during the worst of times. There is a long history of that in Western art — and this work indeed, falls into the canon of Western American art.
Maybe that was Ueyama’s intent, or at least part of it when he was creating. We don’t know.
But we do know that art, rendered with such care and honesty, is a powerful tool in understanding our species at its best and worst. Ueyama’s moments in time, his singular frames, come together into a moving picture about humanity.
Ray Mark Rinaldi is a Denver freelance writer who specializes in fine arts.
IF YOU GO
“The Life and Art of Tokio Ueyama” continues through June 1, 2025, at the Denver Art Museum. Info: 720-865-5000 or denverartmuseum.org.
