GALLERY 2

Chie Fueki: Petal Storm Memory

Curated by David A. Ross

11 May – 15 Dec. 2024

Fueki was born in 1973 in Yokohama, an ultra-modern industrial port that is a prime example of the high-tech rebuilding of Japan following the destruction of World War II. But at age three, her parents moved to São Paulo, Brazil, where her father worked with a Japanese-based global shipping company. It is hard to imagine two more profoundly different cultures than Brazil and Japan. As her mother was not allowed to work in Brazil, she raised Fueki in a very different culture, thousands of miles and culturally light-years away from Japan. So, except for brief visits, Fueki has never lived in Japan as an adult. After attending a Japanese elementary and middle school and an international high school in São Paulo, she moved north to the United States for college and graduate school. Fueki grew up feeling like an outsider in Brazil and then again in the U.S. Even though she was raised in a Japanese household, the cultural collisions she experienced at such an impressionable age enormously impacted her sense of self and left her with a sense of displacement and longing – untethered in her own floating world.