—Arshia Simkin, The Underline
Have you ever wondered how your life would be different if one element was slightly changed: say, you didn’t catch that bus you were running for, or you picked up that phone call from an unknown number? For visual artist Chieko Murasugi, chance is everything. Murasugi is an artist specializing in painting, mixed media, and textile works, and more recently, photography. She uses her art, in part, to explore how random chance impacts our everyday lives. “It’s a concept that we tend to neglect because we like, as individuals, to think that it’s our volition and our efforts that produce results,” she said. She catalogued how chance has played such a huge role in her own life: her parent’s frequently spoke about how their survival in Tokyo during World War II was in large part due to chance.
“I’m using randomization (in my art) because I want to get at the notion of chance in a very rigorous way,” she said. Murasugi uses a computer program that provides random outputs in her work: for example, in her “Playing with Chance” paintings, the computer program randomized “selected elements of the planned pattern, such as color, orientation, [and] position,” according to the description on Murasugi’s website. Similarly, her recent show, “Perchance,” at Gallery Oneoneone, featured a series of red print collages, elements of which were selected by random computer program.
Thematically, Murasugi said she is interested in exploring her Japanese heritage, including her father’s descendance from samurai. In addition, she explores her own personal experiences “as a woman, as a person of color, as an immigrant. As also a person who was a scientist but became an artist,” she said. Strikingly, her evolution from scientist to artist was also by happenstance. “I was doing a postdoctoral fellowship at Standford University in 1990 and I was working in a neurobiology lab. And even though objectively, the work was very, very exciting, you know—this was a leading neurobiology laboratory—I was quite bored with the work,” Murasugi said.
Murasugi recalled how she relayed her feelings of disaffection to her boss, who, to her surprise, was receptive to her angst. He asked her what she was actually interested in and she told him “drawing”: he then asked her to make a drawing of the experimental set up, which was a monkey with many electrodes in its head. “That was sort of the beginning of working as an illustrator. So the fact that he asked me that question and he was understanding about my need to sort of give up on science—I think of that as a really fortunate moment,” Murasugi said.
Even as a practicing artist, Murasugi is struck by the extent to which random chance has played a role in her success: she recalled how she was chosen for inclusion in a prestigious art anthology because the author of the book happened to stumble upon Murasugi’s work at an exhibit in a small, middle-of-nowhere town. “The place looked like a church rummage sale or something like that,” Murasugi said. Another time, Murasugi happened to strike up a correspondence with a curator who was looking for an artist to replace someone who had dropped out of their show at the last minute. “So, again, I had this big beautiful show just from a chance encounter at her show,” Murasugi said.
For beginning artists, Murasugi has two pieces of advice: the first, is recognizing that “to be an artist is a lifetime journey,” Murasugi said. The second is to “go out into the community and to get to know other artists…I always love to do that,” she said.
Learn more about Murasugi’s work at her website https://www.chiekomurasugi.com/ and on Instagram at https://www.instagram.com/cmurasugi/
