Chie Fueki

Chie Fueki (born 1973) is a Japanese American painter. She has had an active career exhibiting her work in commercial galleries and has been represented by Mary Boone Gallery in New York City and Shoshana Wayne gallery in Santa Monica, California. Her intricately patterned and detailed paintings, often created on mulberry paper or wood panel, combine influences from both Eastern and Western decorative and folk arts and range in subject from sports imagery to more traditional subjects such as memento mori and portraits of friends. Laura Newman wrote that the shimmering surfaces in Fueki's paintings "give the works a sensuous, intoxicating delight of the sort more often associated with decoration than with thoughtful contemporary painting." Beyond the surfaces lie rich emotional and sometimes humorous content. She currently lives and works in West Chester, Pennsylvania and Brooklyn, New York.

Early life and career

Fueki was born in Yokohama, Japan in 1973. She spent her childhood in São Paulo, Brazil and studied at the Ringling School of Art & Design in Sarasota, Florida in 1996 and received her MFA from Yale University, in New Haven, Connecticut in 1998.

Artistic practice

"[The] present moment always looks away. Everyone knows that," said Fueki. Chie Fueki's paintings incorporate symbolism from art of the Early Renaissance to ukiyo-e art of Japan and inspiration "from all the great influences in my life", including Piero della Francesca to Philip Guston and her contemporaries. Fueki renders several kinds of spaces in her paintings all at once. Often fragmented, seemingly quilted and embroidered, the cosmic and eternal are evoked in depictions of every day life, existing between painted layers of paper.

Exhibitions

Chie Fueki has had solo exhibitions with Bellwether, Bill Maynes and Mary Boone galleries in New York, Shoshana Wayne gallery in Santa Monica, CA, and the Orlando Museum in Florida. Her paintings have appeared in group exhibitions at MoMA PS1, Frederick Freiser gallery and Susan Inglett gallery in New York. She has delivered lectures on her work at many institutions such as the Massachusetts College of Art and Design, Tyler School of Art, UC Davis, Vassar College, the University of the Arts and the University of Arkansas, and her work has sold at auction.