Maki Ueda

Maki Ueda is an artist based in Okinawa, Japan who is active in the realm of olfactory art. Ueda was born in Tokyo in 1974, and received her B.A. at The Environmental Information Department in Keio University in 1997, and her M.A. in 1999.

Career

Ueda's work Hole in the Earth (2001-2004) was created for V2_, Lab for the Unstable Media in Rotterdam in collaboration with CELL (Initiators of Incidents). Hole in the Earth is a public installation using realtime video, remotely connecting Indonesia and The Netherlands. She further collaborated with V2_ on Palm Top Theater,  with artists Joost Rekveld, Geert Mul, Lia, Arno Coenen, and FoAM together with Performing Pictures. Further collaboration with V2_ took place in 2012, when she returned to create an installation called 'Olfactoscape'. This took the form of a round tent in which exhibition visitors experienced the individual notes of Chanel No. 5.

In 2008, Ueda was invited to contribute to the book “If There Ever Was: An Exhibition of Extinct and Impossible Smells”, a companion piece to an exhibition at Reg Vardy Gallery in England. Participants were given stories to interpret with scent. Ueda was invited to interpret the story of an East German woman "whose bodily scent was taken from her when she was arrested by the Stasi". She interpreted this by distilling her own body scent. Other participants in the project included perfumers Bertrand Duchaufour, Mark Buxton, Christophe Ladaumiel, and Geza Schön. 

In 2012, Maki Ueda worked with Sissel Tolaas, Susana Soares and Caro Verbeek on 'Test_Lab' with Mediamatic, presenting her decomposition of Chanel No. 5. The following year, in 2013, she collaborated with architect Makoto Yokomizo on the 'Invisible White' project, a series of navigational scents created for a Buddhist Pavillion in Japan.

Ueda is a faculty member of ArtScience Interfaculty in Rotterdam, and started her olfactory art course 'Smell and Art' there in 2009 . In the course students learn a conceptual and abstract approach to the medium of smell, using olfaction as a crucial component of game development, and learning chemical skills by extracting and composing smells to support their creations. According to scent historian and curator Caro Verbeek, "Ueda choose the olfactory game as a starting point because it requires a creative approach that is neutral in a sense that the quality and nature of the scents are less important than the sense of smell itself."

In her ongoing works collectively known as 'Olfactory Labyrinth', Ueda uses scents to allow participants to navigate a space with their noses alone, making their way through a labyrinth delineated by small scent bottles suspended from the ceiling. She presented version 2 of this project in 2015 at the 'Scent in Art' exhibition in Villa Rot in Germany. In 2018, Ueda presented her fourth Olfactory Labyrinth at Japan house in Sao Paolo

Maki Ueda teaches and gives workshops about the sense of smell and taste at The Tokyo Art University, The Royal Academy of The Hague (NL), and at the Willem de Kooning Academy (NL). In 2018, she participated in the second Experimental Scent Summit, produced by The Institute for Art and Olfaction in partnership with artist Klara Ravat at the Swedenborg Society in London. There, she gave a talk about her belief that what one smells is less important than the act of smelling, itself. Caro Verbeek explains her work: "Ueda choose the olfactory game as a starting point because it requires a creative approach, that is neutral in a sense that the quality and nature of the scents are less important than the sense of smell itself."

Ueda's approach to olfactory art can be summarized in the following way: "My interest lies in the scent in the real life, such as the smell of space, the smell of food and drink, the smell of a person, and the smell related to the memories.  Traditionally, a preference of the scent has been locally oriented. It owes to the evaporating character of the aromatic substance. So it could be said that the smell, in general, naturally represents the essence of a culture.”

Awards

2009 - Nominated for The World Technology Awards Category: Art (NY, USA)

2016 - Sadakichi Award Finalist, for 'The Juice of War', The Art and Olfaction Awards

2018 - Sadakichi Award Finalist, for 'Olfactory Games', The Art and Olfaction Awards

References

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