Maki Ueda

Olfactory artist Maki Ueda (JP/NL) focuses the spectator’s attention  on her fragrant gestures by minimizing the influence of the other  senses. Her current research explores olfaction in relation to space and  movement resulting in strong, often universal, approaches. She focuses  on the pure experience of a smell instead of a more contextual or  narrative approach. In addition to her own creative work, she teaches  courses on olfactory art at the ArtScience Interfaculty of The Royal  Academy of Art and the Royal Conservatoire, The Hague (NL) since 2009.

She has developed a unique combination of chemical and kitchen skills  in order to extract the scents of daily life, including foods, ambient  aromas, and bodily scents. She creates scents that capture childhood,  identity, a mood, or a historical event. The results of her experiments  take the form of olfactory installations and workshops.  She has  inspired and influenced many olfactory artists for making her process  and recipes “open source” on her blog, and became one of the most famous  olfactory artists (listed on the wikipedia page “olfactory art“)

Maki Ueda studied media art under Masaki Fujihata at The  Environmental Information Department (B.A. 1997, M.A. 1999), Keio  University, Japan. She received a grant from the Japanese government in  2000 and from the POLA Art Foundation in 2007. She has been based in The  Netherlands from 2000 till 2011. She learned perfumery at Grasse  Institute of Perfumery in 2008.She has been nominated for the Art and Olfaction Awards Sadakichi  category, the world’s olfactory art hall of fame, for five consecutive  years, and winning in 2022.

Website: www.ueda.nl

Instagram: @makiueda