Chie Fueki: You & I

About

Visually striking and intricate, Chie Fueki’s paintings picture contemporary life in spectacular motion. The paintings in this exhibition include subjects created through observational studies of friends to psychologically explore day-to-day life as a moving individual. The human scale of the works allows the viewer to be lost in the compositions and envision what it is like to be a body on a subatomic and cellular level. Fueki is interested in the representation of the world and the Self dissolving into one another. A wedding ceremony is portrayed in Brides (Hilary & Ara) (2021) with emanating rays of the sun sharing a point of origin that extends through the structure of the veils. Fueki also refers to the aligning of planets, and playfully includes butterflies, the couple’s cat Harriet, and the architectural space of the Princeton University Chapel where the ceremony was held.

Catherine (2021), with its pulsating shapes and lines, is a portrait of artist Catherine Murphy at work, the energy of her brushwork reverberating across the surface. The edge of the painting represents the surface of the painting Catherine Murphy is touching and quoted within the work are abstract references to several paintings by Murphy, including Cardboard Palette, Cathy, Spruce, Floribunda, and others. Fueki, in all her paintings, imagines what it might be like to be the individuals she depicts – their emotional state, sense of self, and environment interwoven.

Created through a complex system of painting, drawing, cutting, and collaging onto wood panels, Fueki’s practice is centered around the depiction of figures, symbols, and abstracted spaces using multi-layered ornamental surfaces and fields of color. Fueki’s work embraces the visual language from three distinct cultures, being a Japanese-born artist growing up in Brazil, and later practicing in the United States. Fueki explains, “I consider myself a mixed-language painter with interest in eastern and western perspectival systems, architectural graphics, pop animation, pre-Renaissance European painting, and exuberant color.”