ARTIST
STATEMENT

Chie Ushio is a Japanese-born painter based in Leonia, New Jersey. Working primarily in acrylic on canvas, she creates figurative paintings that examine how political systems—healthcare, war, race, and immigration—shape emotional life and are absorbed into the human body.

 

Her practice is rooted in lived experience and informed by a background in classical painting, visual storytelling, and design. Through symbolic portraiture, Ushio addresses subjects such as healthcare inequity, displacement, gendered resilience, and collective grief, using the human figure as a site where social tension and vulnerability intersect.

 

Ushio’s paintings engage with contemporary political realities not through documentation, but through psychological presence. Faces, gestures, and compositional tension function as tools for confronting injustice while preserving individual dignity. Rather than offering resolution, the work holds contradiction, moral discomfort, and unresolved grief.

 

By foregrounding emotional intensity alongside formal control, Ushio asserts painting as a relevant and necessary medium for grappling with the political and emotional conditions of the present.