Measuring little more than two feet tall, the figure’s small stature is offset by the pronounced verticality of her posture and a formal harmony provided by the balance of her body—a serene, triangular balance accentuated by the splashes of color from the three patinated, gold-leafed bells and their attendant fabric. Placid yet not inert, this is a figure animated by a spirit that transcends its stillness and eludes obvious description. Indeed, while the figure’s subdued pose and symbolically charged objects remain more evocative than instructive, its diminutive constitution and outward simplicity belie the expressive power the work commands when standing before it. It is a power manifest in all of Chie’s figures and is due, at least in part, to their complex iconography.

Born in Hamamatsu, Japan in 1971, and raised in Yokohama, Chie draws inspiration for her art from an array of Japanese cultural sources, including local folklore, dance and theater, as well as from Japan’s rich religious and sculptural histories. And while Chie’s sculpture may evoke certain Western representational traditions—antique marble statuary or even Sèvres porcelain busts of the Ancien Régime in France—her work ultimately shares its greatest affinity with the aesthetics and philosophical attitude of a particular Japanese dance called Butoh. Indeed, the near naked forms, shaved heads and minimal costume of Chie’s figures, as well as their luminous white surfaces and stylized mannerisms all owe a debt to Butoh performance—a dance form firmly rooted in an exploration of the physical and metaphysical aspects of the human body.

It is not, or not simply, any particular reference to Japanese traditions that make Chie’s sculpted figures so powerful, however. Rather, the alluring force of Chie’s figures emerges from their decidedly evocative yet elusive nature. With poses and gestures seemingly filled with meaning and reference and yet resistant to easy or precise interpretation, these sculptures yield broader, more general truths about the human condition, truths ultimately knowable only through each viewer’s subjective experience of her figures. It is this subtle and abstract sensibility that permeates much of Chie’s figurative art, and which perhaps paradoxically stems from her keen and intuitive understanding of the human form.

From the outset of her artistic career Chie has exhibited a profound interest in the human figure. Initially a painter, by the time she graduated from the Tokyo National University of Fine Art and Music, Chie was already exploring the expressive properties of other materials, including copper and stone, to represent the human form. It was, however, in the course of her studies at the New York Academy of Art in New York City that she began rendering her figures in clay and with the exquisite anatomical precision that would become the hallmark of her art.

Chie’s current artistic process involves sculpting her diminutive forms, then casting them from molds using a mixture of plaster and fine cement. Once the casting process is complete, Chie primes the surfaces of her sculptures with a gesso-like base coat made from seashell powder, upon which she applies multiple layers of pigment. Each layer is painstakingly sanded after its application, so that the finished surfaces of her figures bear the trace evidence of these earlier coatings. Using a sculpting tool, Chie then carefully grooves the surface with small hatch marks, which, along with the process of building up and sanding down the layers of pigment, provides texture and gives the surfaces of her figures a unique density and dimensionality.

In the end, it is in and through these complex surfaces and the suggestive poses of her meditative figures that the enduring power of Chie’s art emerges. By allowing these evocative aspects of her figures a certain freedom to signify without burdening them with rigid significations, Chie conveys through form—human form—the abstract beauty and profundity of the human condition. With their taciturn air and postures devoid of urgency or obvious intent, the power of Chie’s sculptures ultimately rests in the way that they enlist us, however briefly, to enter into an equally serene and contemplative state.

By Max Weintraub, Ph.D.

Max received his Ph.D. in the History of Art from Bryn Mawr College in 2006. He has worked in curatorial and educational departments at the Denver Art Museum, The Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Museum of Modern Art in New York. From 2006-2008, he was the curator of The Reis Collection of Modern & Contemporary Art in New York City. Presently, Max is an adjunct professor in the Department of History of Art at Hunter College, where he teaches graduate and undergraduate courses on Modern and Contemporary Art.