Chie Fueki

The Utah Museum of Contemporary Art, in partnership with the Jarvis and Constance Doctorow Family Foundation, is honored to present the winner of the 2023 Catherine Doctorow Prize for Contemporary Painting, Chie Fueki. The prize, which began in 2011, is jointly administered by UMOCA and Suzanne Larson, who created the award to honor her mother who was a painter.

Winner of both the Joan Mitchell Fellowship (2021) and the Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship (2022), Fueki received her MFA from Yale University in 1998. Her intricate paintings draw on both Eastern and Western traditions, and her multi-linguistic experience as a painter born in Japan, raised in São Paulo, Brazil, now residing in the Hudson River Valley.

Visually-striking and intricate, Chie Fueki’s paintings picture contemporary life in spectacular motion. Created through a complex system of painting, drawing, cutting, and collaging onto wood panels, her practice is centered around the depiction of figures, symbols, and abstract spaces using multi-layered ornamental surfaces and fields of color.

Describing her work, she says, “I’m interested in painting because it is a place where mixed language situations can happen visually…I consider myself a mixed-language painter with an interest in Eastern and Western perspectival systems, architectural graphics, pop animation, pre-Renaissance European painting, and exuberant color.” Fueki’s work embraces the visual language from her three distinct cultural influences.