１．

“Time flows not only from the past to the future,
but from the future back into the past.”
These are the words of artist Suzume Uchida.
She adds,
“the past is not something finished; it remains
a part of our ongoing experience.”

If these words resonate, then it will be with
those who have experienced losing something
precious to them. And there are likely none
who have never lost something dear.

The words come from Uchida’s Artist Statement,
which she wrote for her solo exhibition
scheduled to begin on Saturday, December 6,
2025, and to run until Friday the 26th
of the same month. Common sense tells us
that “time flows from the past to the future.”
Here, that common wisdom is overturned.

The past is never something that has passed.
Failure and success, sadness and happiness,
despair and hope — all are drawn into the
present and the future of those who go on
living, appearing through the small cracks
of daily life.

Thus the past is lived again, and each time
it takes on new meaning, standing before us
like a ghost. “Time flows not only from the
past to the future, but from the future
back into the past.”

２．

The solo exhibition, titled “As You Truly Are”,
displays forty-two art pieces.
Of these, three were drawn specifically as
“WILDSIDE×Suzume Uchida ‘As You Truly Are’ Collaboration” items.

The three pieces, (1) “As You Truly Are”, (2) “Hand and Hand”,
and (3) “Crown of Thorns”, are used as prints on half-sleeve t-shirts,
rayon shirts, and tote bags.

The exhibition’s title of “As You Truly Are” is an open call by Uchida.
It is aimed at those who could not or currently cannot always live
as their “true self”, much like the “Uchida of the Past”.

Simultaneously, it is a message from a woman who has become
the mother to a single small life to her four-year-old daughter as well –
a way to relive the “Four-Year-Old Uchida”
who was unable to be her “true self”.

She lives her past anew in the present by relating
her current and past selves and thus layering her identity.
This, I believe, is the concept.

"The past is not something finished;
it remains a part of our ongoing experience."

３．

There is no doubt that Yohji Yamamoto, too,
carries a precious past that he has lost.

The year following Yamamoto’s birth in 1943,
his father was taken to war at the age of thirty-five,
never to come home.
His mother continued to wait for his return.

Yamamoto once told me that
"some years after the war, when I was four or five years old,
and under the relentless pressure of our relatives,"
his mother had no choice but to conduct a funeral for his father
without any of his remains.

The young Yohji Yamamoto couldn’t accept this.
He couldn’t accept that his mother was compelled,
for the convenience of adults,
to hold a funeral she did not wish to hold.

He couldn’t accept a society of adults
who had manipulated his mother
to suit their own selfish ends.

He told me that, at that moment,
he decided he would never, ever, participate in such a society.

Born an unhappy child in an unhappy age,
Yohji Yamamoto was haunted from the very beginning by death –
by a life that had already been lost.

And so, protecting his mother
from the ugly world of adults
became his mission from the start.
His mother, too,
was a person defined by loss.

４．

Suzume Uchida and Yohji Yamamoto’s first
collaboration was in 2017.

That June, Uchida traveled to Paris Fashion
Week (Men’s) wearing a black one-piece dress
by Ground Y and a black rayon jacket.

There, at the Yohji Yamamoto POUR HOMME
2018 S/S Collection, ten of her "ghost
paintings" – comprising both past works
and new pieces created for the occasion –
made their runway debut, printed upon
long silk shirts.

It was her first time wearing Yohji’s clothes
as well as her first time witnessing a
runway show in Paris.

Ever since, the collaboration between
Suzume Uchida and Yohji Yamamoto has
endured, culminating in the announcement
and release of these collaborative items
with WILDSIDE.

Uchida has said that she loved to draw
from a very young age.

She dreamed of becoming an illustrator
in the future, yet at the age of seventeen,
she was compelled to abandon that dream.

Instead of attending art school, she majored
in design at the University of Tsukuba.
After graduating, she found employment at a
firm related to advertising and publishing.

However, she soon found herself unable
to cope and quit her job.

As she recounts in a magazine interview,
she then spent "about two years living
an almost completely bedridden life."

It was during this period that she recalled
the joy she had felt drawing as a child.

As she began to visit galleries at her own
pace, mindful of her health, she encountered
the work of a painter from her own generation.

This encounter became the spark that led her
to begin creating works of her own.

In 2014, at the age of twenty-seven, urged
on by others, she held her first solo
exhibition.

In parallel, she submitted a piece titled
"Anorexia and Self-Destruction" to a web
competition for ghost paintings, where it
was awarded the Grand Prize.

This piece was also among those printed in her first
collaboration with Yohji Yamamoto POUR HOMME.

When Suzume Uchida uploaded this image
to her Instagram (suzume_uchida), she
accompanied it with a harrowing caption:

"Anorexia.
I want to eat so badly I could die,
yet the fear of gaining weight prevents me.
If that is the case, then I shall tear out
my small intestine and make this body into
one that cannot absorb nutrition.
If I had died in those days,
this is the sort of ghost I would have become."

５．

The following passage is from Baudelaire’s
The Flowers of Evil, in the poem
The Self-Tormentor:

I am the wound, and yet the blade!
The smack, and yet the cheek that takes it!
The limb, and yet the wheel that breaks it,
The torturer, and he who's flayed!

One of the sort whom all revile,
A Vampire, my own blood I quaff,
Condemned to an eternal laugh
Because I know not how to smile.
(Translator’s note: English translation by
Roy Campbell, in Poems of Baudelaire, 1952)

I had a realization.
Is not “I am the wound, and yet the blade”
the very essence of Suzume Uchida’s
Anorexia and Self-Destruction?

Further, does not “the sort whom all revile”
recall the following words of Nelson Algren,
regarding his seminal A Walk on the Wild Side?

“The book asks why lost people sometimes
develop into greater human beings than those
who have never been lost in their whole lives.
Why men who have suffered at the hands of
other men are the natural believers in humanity,
while those whose part has been simply to acquire,
to take all and give nothing,
are the most contemptuous of mankind.”

As one of the “sort whom all revile” himself,
the young Yohji Yamamoto must have had
the same question in his mind as well.

The women captured in Suzume Uchida’s
ghost paintings are also each
the “sort whom all revile” as well.

Thus, the meeting and collaboration of
Suzume Uchida and WILDSIDE
was an inevitability.

WILDSIDE × Suzume Uchida items are available here.


Suzume Uchida Solo Exhibition ‘As You Truly Are’ Exhibition Information
Dates: December 6 (Sat) – December 26 (Fri), 2025
Venue: SAI
Address: RAYARD MIYASHITA PARK South 3F, 6-20-10 Jingumae, Shibuya-ku, Tokyo 150-0001
Hours: 11:00–20:00(JST)
Tel: +81-3-6712-5706

Suzume Uchida - Artist
A recurring theme in Uchida's work is a sense of vitality that comes from formative experiences rather than negative emotions.
She first collaborated with Yohji Yamamoto in 2017 on a collection that debuted at Paris Fashion Week and was sold worldwide.
Since then, she has continued to work closely with the brand year after year.
In 2020, she collaborated on a collection with Adidas Y-3; and in 2022, she produced a collaboration with be@rbrick.
Uchida has participated in numerous exhibitions at galleries and art fairs both in Japan and abroad.

Masafumi Suzuki - Editor / Journalist
Born in Tokyo in 1949. Editor-in-chief of "GQ JAPAN" from January 2012 to December 2021, editor-in-chief of "ENGINE" from August 2000 to August 2011, and editor-in-chief of "NAVI" from 1989 to 1999.
He is a graduate of Keio University, Faculty of Letters.
After working as a reporter for an English-language newspaper in the shipping and shipbuilding industry, he participated in the launch of NAVI in 1984.
He is the author of " ○✕ (Marukusu)" (Nigensha), "Run! Yokoguruma" (Shogakukan Bunko), and "Suzuki-san's Life and Opinions" (Shinchosha), among others.