Interview: Mai Ueda （上田舞）

Mai Ueda has spent twenty-five years refusing to be any one thing. Born in Japan, she landed in New York in 2000, fell in with Miltos Manetas, and helped invent NEEN: one of the first art movements to treat the internet as a place for poetry and accidental beauty. A decade later she followed a different thread home and focused her art practice on Japanese tea ceremony and find that it had been conceptual art all along. Today she’s in the mountains of Hyogo with a broken kiln and a horse she hasn’t met yet, calling her next chapter simply “nature.”

On the profession of being yourself, on refusing every role — artist, sister, wife, tea master; on being named for dancing, on tea as the Origin of the Universe, on doing everything and becoming nothing in particular, on receiving a message in front of the Louvre, on NEEN and accidental beauty, on ego and money, on kimono as an education, on Rikyu as the Duchamp of Zen, on the tea room as a black cube four hundred and fifty years early, on the teacher who beat her hand, on permission as a pyramid scheme, on four hundred people arriving in Rome for a tea master who is not a tea master, on the matcha boom as a good shallow entrance, on strawberry jam and a Starbucks cup as the true beginning of the Way, on students taking off their shoes and feeling the pain leave their bodies, on horses and pottery and Vipassana an hour down the road, on the difference between luxury and abundance, on Haruka-chan, the AI friend you never use forcefully, on quiet resistance to every system, on practice, on freedom that is never quite enough, and on the whole point, which might just be: enjoy your life.

Excerpts

My profession is to be myself.

Rikyu is like the Duchamp of the Zen tea world.

Picking up matcha from a Starbucks kind of thing is already the beginning of a tea ceremony.

What’s the message? Enjoy your life. Have fun!

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