Esther Shimazu’s nudes affirm the primacy of personal vision. The artist is fond of saying that her figures are confident and happy being who they are: “Nude, bald, and happy, her figures refuse to take life’s concerns on the chin."

A third generation Japanese-American and native of Honolulu, Shimazu is one of five sisters, all born with a seven-year span. She credits this rapid-fire succession of siblings as the motivation for the familial imagery in her work. By her own admission, her nudes are expressionistic statements about her background, culture, and experience. Shimazu booby-traps us in the act of looking, forcing our perceptions to shift to accommodate her provocative style and the potent physicality of her work. Her nudes are not static, objectified representations of idealized Asian beauty, demure and resolved. Rather, this artist spars with us, presenting the raw truth of exposed flesh cascading into folds and undulating expanses, articulating breast, belly, and genitalia. Forthright and self-possessed, Shimazu’s nudes challenge us to jettison our voyeurism.

The physicality of her nudes derives from their organic, bulbous volumes. In any well-formed pot, the center – or belly – is the essential volume. Shimazu goes to the well of traditional form and comes up with a full bucket: she makes the belly the focal point of every nude. Although they bear an aesthetic affinity to the pre-Columbian figurative pots of Nayarit and the lounging nudes of the French sculptor Gaston Lachaise, Shimazu’s figures are rooted in and emblematic of Japanese culture and religion. Hara is the Japanese word that describes a person’s belly, or center, the center of the soul, the center of balance and reference, the center of who you are (hara-kiri, the term for ritual suicide by disembowelment, literally means slitting the belly). Those who practice the Japanese martial art of aikido learn that the center of all unity and power resides in the hara. The protruding belly also suggests traditional Asian sculptures of Buddha, a reference reinforced by Shimazu’s designation of the figures as “little deities.”

The artist’s own figure is the primary source of her own personal exploration. Because she is the model, all sculptures share common traits. Yet they are stylized portraits rather than strict self-portraiture; Shimazu’s concern is not with the rigors of representation but with expressiveness. Her figures are deliberately bald and unclad, as if investing them with coiffures and clothing would impart too much information. She prefers them uncluttered, without culture or social signifiers.

Esther Shimazu’s sculptures comment on a society that looks askance at naked direct and guileless presentation and prefers the virtual over the real, image over object, artifice over honesty. Nude, bald, and happy, her figures refuse to take life’s concerns on the chin. Their brazen demeanor propels the viewer against the ropes, forcing engagement with the senses.