Stardust

SOPHIA CHIZUCO

Coming Full Circle

Currently on view at the Makati Shangri-la, Manila is “Stardust,” by New York-based Japanese artist Sophia Chizuco. Organized by Hiraya Gallery, it is an exhilarating visual adventure:  discovering, and embracing all the rich symbolisms of this most mysterious geometric form, self-contained, without beginning and end, spinning itself perpetually into infinity – the circle.

It is, too, the most poetic of shapes: it is the sun, the moon, the atom, the halo, the rose window, the mandala or the Holy Circle, the round table where everyone is equal, the wheel, or the symbol of mobility. Indeed, even the square managed to insinuate itself within the circle, famously as in Da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man.

For Chizuco, “the circle is the most peaceful shape.” That she would connect expressively with this most meditative shape should come as no surprise. She was, as she says, “born and raised in the countryside of Japan surrounded by mountains, green tea fields and the Pacific Ocean.” Moreover, she is the daughter of a microbiologist whose work it is to study and contemplate the cosmos of living organisms. By sheer instinct, Chizuco naturally felt the sensations of a shape breathing with life.

And by what marvel of motion and colors does Chizuco create a language of eloquence and, intriguingly, silence,  in the configurations of her multitude of circles, set in a whirlwind of rotation and pulsation,  evoking, as their titles make inevitable, a cascade of waterfall, a gathering fog, atomic fusion, galactic forces, a blaze of molecules, a bloom of cherry flowers, a sky spangled with rainbows.

In “Stardust,” Sophia Chizuco’s art has come full circle.

                                                -------- Cid Reyes