ARTIST

Rio Uchino

Born in Tokyo, in 2000. He completed his Master’s Program at the 6th Laboratory of Oil Painting, Department of Painting, Graduate School of Fine Arts, Tokyo University of the Arts in 2026. His main exhibition includes “from the ROOM” (MJK Gallery, Tokyo, 2024), “Pithecanthropus: Project by the 6th Laboratory Oil-Painting Department of Tokyo University of the Arts” (MITSUKOSHI CONTEMPORARY GALLERY, Tokyo, 2025).

Artist Statement
The act of “hanging a painting in the sky” is situated just outside two pictorial traditions concerning distance and height.
It is less an act of painting than an attempt to temporarily entrust an image — one that has lost its support — to the space between the gaze and gravity.
In Western painting, where there is a convention of representing distance as height, a horse receding into the background is simply placed a few centimeters higher on the canvas.
The farther an object is, the higher it is pushed on the picture plane; as depth is lifted into the vertical axis, the sky has functioned as a device for converting distance.
There, the gaze penetrates from front to back, and space is measured, organized, and grasped.
Eastern painting, by contrast, offers a different kind of depth — one that fragments the composition through scattered-point perspective or a bird’s-eye view.
For example, by incorporating clouds, mountains appear to rise, and the relationship between foreground and background becomes one of “sliding and layering” rather than “rising.”
Here, distance is not translated into height; instead, height is folded like a fusuma screen that compresses distance within itself.
The act of “hanging a painting in the sky” resist absorption into either of these spatial treatments. It uses the sky neither as a device for converting distance nor as a field for folding layers; instead, it is an attempt to hold the image, suspended between the body and the gaze.
Here, the sky is no longer the subject to be painted.
Woven and reconstructed, the painting is given a place to exist in space without being fixed to a wall. Paint generates differences in tension and density, and the image neither stands on its own nor touches the ground.
It is perceived as weight and density, yet it refuses to settle into spatial coordinates — up or down, front or back, supported or unsupported.
What wavers is not the image itself, but the room that contains it.
This condition arises quietly, as the very terms on which a painting can exist.
Height is not a measurable quantity, but the interval that comes into being so that an image may be hung; distance is not depth, but the invisible tension stretched between the body and the image.
Perhaps this state is the minimum form of the act of “hanging a painting in the sky.”