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Hiroshi Ueta is about to show me how he paints. First we look at some brushes that hang from his calligrapher’s tool rack. There is one made of peacock feathers, and one made of rabbit’s whiskers—novelties.
"The brushes I like to use are made of sheep’s wool,” he says, and shows me what they look like. They have surprisingly long hairs. The length and tensility of the brush’s fibres are crucial to Ueta’s calligraphic art, which is like nothing I have ever seen – sharp around the edges; liquid in the centre. The brush he shows me is dry and fluffed out so it is hard to imagine it becoming slim enough to make those sharp lines of his. But when it is wet, full of ink, it is a different looking brush and he explains that it is the long fibres of the wool that allow him to achieve his non-stop fluid lines, because they hold more ink for longer."
 Now he bends over at the waist. Holding the sheeps’ wool brush absolutely upright so that the fibres just touch the floor, he moves it to make a word of three hiragana characters all joined together in one continuous line going down the page: shiiiiii guuuuuuu reeee. His movement—unhurried and purposeful— is a joy to watch: I feel my own tension being released and briefly entertain the thought of a circle of people surrounding Ueta for “relaxation therapy by calligraphy.”
The beauty of his lines is no accident, no child’s play. It takes a long time to get to the point where he is ready to finally commit. In preparation he brushes the chosen word over and over until the page is black. He is searching for just the right balance of loops and lines and empty space. When he sees a composition he likes and which reflects the meaning he wants to convey, he begins a process he calls “getting his arm to remember.” This is vital because he doesn’t want his thought process to get in the way and sully the final work. When his hand has remembered he then places a white sheet of paper on the floor and lets the brush move. He confides that he does hope for “something accidental” – not a big accident, just a little one – that might add unexpected interest to the outcome. Sometimes he gets what he wants first try, but even at this stage there are glitches and the rejects go into the bin.
 Though Ueta now chooses to live in Kyoto (“It is the best place to get my calligrapher’s materials”) he was born and raised on the island of Shikoku, where his parents sent him to calligraphy lessons from age six. The beauty and discipline of the art interested him enough to chose it as a major at university, and he went to China at 25, to discover more about its historical roots. But by then he had discovered a more pressing passion—for music, especially the Blues. Though he wanted to go to Chicago, the closest place he could get a long-stay visa for was Canada. In Toronto he stepped into a gallery holding an exhibition of Japanese art.
“That exhibition made me wonder what interested Western people about Japanese art and it set me thinking about what I could do as a Japanese. I showed the gallery owner some of my calligraphy—at the time only standard textbook stuff—but he liked it and even agreed to give me a show.”
Ueta went back to Japan and started to play around a bit more and discovered that it was hiragana more than kanji that interested him. “Kanji has too much cultural baggage. Take the character for god—kami: it contains the central element of “sun” because in ancient times people thought the sun was god. But in modern times we have different conceptions of god, so that kanji character is now outdated. By contrast the hiragana syllabary is like the alphabet—you join letters together to make words, so it’s nice and neutral.” It is also beautiful. Hiragana is what the court ladies of the 10th century used to write their elegant diaries while the males of the day struggled with stiff kanji characters from China. In their liquid lines of words the ladies were mimicking the elegance of streams or willow branches.
Ueta’s hiragana has some of that ancient elegance, but it is different again. First of all he is not stringing together letters to make a sentence that conveys a meaning; he is choosing a word from his language that appeals to his poetic sensibility and giving it form in an imagery that most perfectly fits its poetic sentiment.
Imagine using your computer and picking out a heavily slanted font to convey the feeling of the word “speed.” It is something like that but in Ueta’s case he does not try to make a word legible: the loops and lines of the separate letters often jumble together or overlap in such a complex way it is impossible to read them without prompts. The beauty of the resulting shape and the relationship of tension produced between it and the white space around it is what makes it amazing. The reader who wants to know what it actually says can consult the statement of artist’s intent that comes with every work, each an example of the artist’s profound thinking. For example, one of the words he likes to depict in hiragana is yokan (よかん) and this is how he describes it:
Yokan: “I have a feeling that…”
How often have we had these odd “feelings” about something?
But where do they come from; what makes us have them?
Experience? Memory? Instinct? There must be a reason. This word “yokan” depicts that niggling “feeling.”
After looking at Ueta’s hiragana with its ethereal beauty, I find myself seeing the traditional kanji calligraphy as stodgy clods by comparison. This could be dangerous: I may never be able to enjoy kanji again!
I ask Ueta about how he sees his future with calligraphy and what made him choose it as his life work over the Blues, which was his passion for so long.“I love the Blues. But no matter how passionate about it I become, the fact is that I’m not black and I didn’t grow up in that culture so I will never be able to go past a certain point with it: my music will always lack that exceptional quality of the so-called “blue note” which really moves people. But Japanese calligraphy is something that, as someone born and bred in the Japanese culture, I may be able to take beyond that certain point which is just technique and have the power to really move people.
In 2005 he was recognized by the Kyoto City Society for the Fine Arts, which
distinguished him with their highest award for emerging talent.
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