Anne Chu

The terracotta warriors of China, medieval friezes, photographs of birds, classical sculptures—all have served as inspiration for Anne Chu’s art. Having studied printmaking and sculpture at the Philadelphia College of Art (B.F.A., 1982) and sculpture at Columbia University (M.F.A., 1985), she executes sculptures in media ranging from cast paper to wood to ceramics, but also works with watercolors and egg tempera and oil on gessoed panels. Working in a foundry in Switzerland she has also used state-of-the-art aeronautic technology to create figures of anodized aluminum shot through with titanium color that look like feather-light Styrofoam, belying their true weight and actual texture.

Although her works are inspired by existing art they are never imitative. Intrigued by the terracotta warriors, for example, she made the life-sized cast paper bears and bears’ heads that first won for her acclaim as an artist. Her interest piqued by photographs of birds, she re-figured them by manipulating the pictures then using a computer-driven embroidery machine to render them anew as life-sized cloth sculptures. Her highly praised artist’s book Modes, Manners and Monsters (Scalo Press, 2006) consisted of sixty watercolors inspired by a series of books on fashion and mannerisms. More recently, she has been creating a work of about fifty abstract landscapes, rendered in egg tempera and oil on gessoed panels, that are based on The Song of Solomon, which she hopes will “combine differences in the portrayal of sensuality between western and eastern sensibilities, and find a language between the two that lies in a non-gendered voice.”

The Monica De Cardenas galleries in Milan, Italy, and Zuoz, Switzerland; the Dallas Museum of Art; the Indianapolis Museum of Art; Victoria Miro Gallery in London; Weatherspoon Art Museum in Greensboro, North Carolina; Donald Young Gallery in Chicago, and 303 Gallery in New York City are among the many venues where Anne Chu has had solo exhibitions. She has also participated in numerous group exhibitions around the world, including Paper 1 at Galerie Friedrich in Basel, Switzerland, in 2002; the 54th Annual Carnegie International Exhibition at the Carnegie Museum in Pittsburgh in 2004; Discover US! At Ufferhallen in Berlin Germany, in 2009; and a two-person show with Matthew Monahan at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia in 2010.

Her work is in the permanent collections of more than a score of public and museum venues, including the Weatherspoon Art Gallery; the Art Museum of Princeton University; the Museum of Contemporary Art and the Musuem of Modern Art in New York City; FRAC de Picardie in Amiens, France; and the Microsoft Art Collection in Redmond, Washington, to name a few. In addition, her piece Mountain Views is a permanent installation at the American Embassy in Beijing, China.

Anne Chu’s artistic achievement has been recognized with residencies at Dieu Donne Papermill, Art/Omi, and Alpert/Ucross; with grants from NEA/Arts International, Art Matters, and the Joan Mitchell Foundation; and with awards from the Louis Comfort Tiffany Biennial Competition, the Anonymous Was a Woman Foundation, and the Penny McCall Foundation.