NOSTOS: IDEAS and INFLUENCES Kim Uchiyama in Conversation with Lilly Wei

Kim Uchiyama was born in Des Moines, IA (1955) and lives and works in New York City. She studied at Drake University, Yale Summer School of Art and Music and the New York Studio School of Drawing, Painting & Sculpture.

Color acts as light in Uchiyama’s paintings to construct a visceral sense of place, characterized by simple relationships of form such as those found in ancient classical orders. Her paintings embody references to the nature of a particular place and can be seen as a restatement of these influences in the language of contemporary abstraction. Recent solo exhibitions include Helm Contemporary, New York, The Lobby Gallery at 499 Park Avenue, New York, and Pamela Salisbury Gallery, Hudson, NY.Uchiyama’s work has been reviewed in The New York Times, ARTnews, The Brooklyn Rail, The New Criterion, The Hudson Review, The Hopkins Review, Artcritical.com, Two Coats of Paint, and Hyperallergic Magazine. She is a New York Foundation for the Arts recipient, two-time MacDowell Fellow, current Artist-In-Residence at Art Cake, Brooklyn, and is President of American Abstract Artists.

Lilly Wei (b. Chengdu, China) is a New York-based independent curator, critic, and journalist whose area of interest is global contemporary art and, in particular, art by emerging artists. Her writings have appeared in dozens of publications world-wide and she is a longtime contributor to Art in America and a contributing editor at ARTnews in the United States. The author of numerous catalogues and monographs, she has curated exhibitions in the United States, Europe, and Asia. Wei lectures frequently on critical and curatorial practices and sits on the board of several not-for-profit art institutions and organizations. She has an MA in art history from Columbia University in New York.