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.

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.”