Unquiet
Things

When you stand before one of Chie Yoshii‘s paintings, you might notice the technical mastery first—that jewel-like luminosity built up through countless translucent glazes on wood panel, each layer deepening the richness until gold leaf seems to glow beneath skin, until fabric appears soft enough to touch. Every thread is visible, every feather meticulously rendered. It’s a technique inherited from the Flemish masters, requiring patience and precision. The attentiveness  to the process is such that you could almost smell the fragrance of the painting (and if her art were perfume, I think it might have notes of whipped orange blossom honey, pomegranate flower smoke, and petitgrain, neroli’s bitter, greener cousin, sweet and dark and verdant all at once.)

But then your attention and your appreciation shifts the longer your gaze lingers upon the canvas. A woman with a lion cub pressed against her cheek gazes downward. A fox perches on an armored shoulder, both human and animal staring forward with identical intensity. A unicorn leans its head on a woman’s shoulder in water so blue it seems to glow. You begin to realize these seem less like portraits of dominion or allegory, more like moments of profound communion.

This quality—this sense of communion between human and animal—drew me to include Yoshii’s work in The Art of Fantasy, alongside other contemporary artists who explore the spaces between human and animal, real and imagined. In my caption for her painting Hemera, I wrote: “The artist often features animal companions in her works, from the mundane and many-legged to the fantastical winged and scaled variety, and whose appearance suggests companionship and camaraderie rather than danger or menace, or, on the other end of the spectrum, mere pet ownership.”

“Painting for me is ‘participation mystique,'” Yoshii has explained. “It is not about reality, but about the fantasies aroused by its effects. They are viscerally conceived and more tangible than reality.”

Participation mystique describes a state where the boundary between self and other becomes porous, where one participates mystically in the life of another being. Beautiful and unsettling, this dissolution of separateness, an experience of depth and power. Perhaps you cannot rush into such a state. Perhaps it requires the same quality of patience and presence that Yoshii brings to her panels, building up color through repeated application of thin glazes, each layer a small act of faith that the accumulated whole will eventually reveal what needs to be seen. What develops between her figures, woman and wolf, woman and owl, woman and lion cub, is a secret language of history between two beings, spoken without words, understood without translation.

A deep sense of reverence permeates Yoshii’s work, visible in every corner of her compositions. She paints with exquisite exactitude. A butterfly hovering at the edge of the frame receives the same meticulous attention as the face at its center. A cluster of berries is rendered with the same care as a crown. Every petal, every strand of hair, every individual feather—nothing is disposable, nothing hurried. This isn’t technical skill alone, though the skill is undeniable. It’s a quality of respect for the work itself, for the time it takes, for each element that comprises the whole. You can feel it when you stand before these paintings: you’re in the presence of work made with deep care.

Yellow butterflies scatter across compositions, landing on bare skin, hovering near feathered companions, perpetually transforming between one form and another. A woman submerged in brilliant blue water shares that water with a white unicorn, surrounded by tall grasses and white lilies, each blade of grass, each lily petal given its due. Dense dark foliage creates sanctuary around them. A celestial creature stands on a tree branch surrounded by cascading purple wisteria, her light blue wings spread wide, her peacock-patterned tail feathers transitioning from blue to green in elaborate eye-marked plumage—each eye-spot on each feather carefully observed and rendered. She appears entirely at home in her hybrid nature, neither fully human nor fully bird but both at once.

A woman rests in flowing white, and on her hands sits a small winged creature with a jewel-encrusted collar, part mammal, part fantasy. Red drapery and pink roses glow behind them, each fold of fabric, each rose petal attended to. Her expression is utterly peaceful, her breathing synchronized with this strange companion.

The women gaze downward or close their eyes entirely, turned inward to some shared interior space. Large ornate antlers curve upward from serene faces, adorned with blue and purple flowers woven through their branches, clusters of bright red berries, white lilies blooming where throat meets collarbone. The antlers, traditionally the stag’s, the hunter’s trophy, become a framework for flowers, the boundary between human skull and animal bone no longer fixed or certain.

“I stare at the darkness in my mind and images slowly float up,” Yoshii has said of her process. The concept or interpretation comes later, sometimes only after the painting is finished. You cannot force the unconscious to yield its images on demand. You can only create the conditions: the patience, the stillness, the quality of attention…and wait for what surfaces. She channels myths, allowing archetypal forms to surface from what Jung called the collective unconscious.

Just as bees know instinctively how to dance, she suggests, we all carry within us inherited images, patterns imprinted in the substrate of human consciousness long before we learned to articulate them in language. Jung wrote that mythology is filled with symbols that echo archetypes in our minds because it was itself inspired by those archetypes. We inherit these images, patterns, and forms that surface across cultures and centuries because they speak to something fundamental in human psychology. Her paintings exist in these resonant frequencies, moments between souls.

An entity sits enthroned on dark swirling clouds, crowned with elaborate headdresses swirling in invisible winds, pouring golden grains endlessly from her hands while geese circle through a moody sky. The extravagant contrasts between near-black shadow and luminous flesh create theatrical drama, but Yoshii’s figures emerge from darkness into light, existing comfortably in both. Jung wrote that everyone carries a shadow, and the less it is embodied in conscious life, the blacker and denser it becomes. In Yoshii’s work, the shadows receive as much careful attention as the light, both necessary, both honored.

This year saw the publication of Dreams, Yoshii’s first major monograph—200 pages collecting over a decade of paintings alongside essays, enlarged details, and text in both English and Japanese.  It’s the kind of book you want to touch, to turn pages slowly, to return to again and again. The kind of object that deserves a place on your winter solstice wish list, though fair warning: once you bring it home, you may find yourself reluctant to wrap it for anyone else.

And perhaps that’s the point! To return, to sit with these images, to let them work on you slowly. The women in Yoshii’s paintings exist without explanation, crowned and adorned, accompanied and embraced. The more time you spend with them, the more you notice: another flower hidden in shadow, the way an animal’s gaze mirrors its human companion’s, the quiet revelations that accumulate in the luminous space between their closed eyes and resting heads, between the darkness behind them and the light that illuminates their faces. There, we might glimpse our own reflection, animal and human both, inseparable.

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