This fall, Sarasota Art Museum opens the first mid-career survey of Ringling Fine Arts alum Chie Fueki’s 25-year painting practice, tracing the trajectory of an artist whose foundations lie at the College. Here, amid the college’s studios, she first cultivated the meticulous, layered technique that now defines her work in collections nationwide.
Running Oct. 18, 2026, through April 4, 2027, the exhibition brings together works by Fueki, who has also exhibited at the Mary Boone Gallery in New York and the Shoshana Wayne Gallery in Los Angeles, with work held in the permanent collection of the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, among many others.
Fueki has built a reputation for transforming scenes of everyday life into extraordinary spaces. She paints and layers custom-hued mulberry paper into cut-paper collages, then builds atop them with further drawing and painting, a patient, painstaking process that yields images seeming to manifest from the inside out.
“Surface is one of the most important aspects of my work,” Fueki said. “How raised, how flat, how matte, or how shiny the treatment of an area is—this is a really big part of my thinking while making.”
Fueki’s own geography is layered: born in Yokohama, raised in São Paulo, and moved to the United States for college. That itinerancy has left her attuned to home not as a fixed place, but as a symbol.
In her 2004 work Mt. Fuji, an erupting volcano occupies space within an oblique drawing of a cube. The work explores identity and place, depicting the iconic landmark in blazing red-orange pigment.
“Mt. Fuji became a symbol of a place that felt like it was supposed to be home,” the artist explained. “The Mount Fuji that I knew was not the realistic Mount Fuji, but the way Hokusai represented it in various depictions of his Fuji, which was more exaggerated. His red Fuji is, of course, so iconic and prolific, so I made my own fluorescent orange version in homage to his well-known work.”
Black flowers and a skull swirl within the billowing smoke, while the cube’s rigid lines hold the eruption in an uneasy stillness, a quiet frame for an otherwise seismic event.
Fueki lives and works in Beacon, NY. She earned her MFA at Yale University. She was the 2025 recipient of a MacDowell Fellowship, the Pocantico Prize, the 2024 Rockefeller Brothers Fund, she received UMOCA’s Catherine Doctorow Prize for Contemporary Painting in 2023, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship in 2022, Joan Mitchell Fellowship from 2021 to 2025, American Academy of Arts and Letters’ Purchase Prize in 2004 and 2021, and a Rosenthal Family Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2004.
Chie Fueki: Painting the Floating World was curated by Lacie Barbour, curator of modern and contemporary art, with Rangsook Yoon, Ph.D., former senior curator.
