Junko Chodos​

 

 

 

 

 

 

Born Junko Takahashi in 1939 in Tokyo, Junko finds her earliest memories amid the din

of air–raid sirens, the frenzy of continual flight to safer ground and the privation that characterized her family’s daily life during war. Her father, a doctor, was summoned day and night to attend wounded civilians. In his absence, her mother would often hand–crank the phonograph to play, in a darkened room, at a barely audible level, Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony for her three young daughters. ”I want you to know the most beautiful thing mankind has ever produced,” she said, “before your short lives end.”

 

Junko heard and saw the glorious architecture of the music and from her age of four, determined to create a glorious architecture of her own, but in her painting.Her family survived. As a pupil at Gakushuin, a private school in Tokyo attended by the children of the emperor and other notable personages, Junko confesses,” I painted in the old-fashioned way to avoid trouble altogether and to protect my soul.” But she painted in secret, her own way.

 

In 1968 Junko emigrated to America –not to become an artist but to exist as an artist. Throughout the 1970’s her work was focused on the power of vision and its role in the process of learning something from beginning to end, "from outside to inside, until it comes to life."Junko Chodos has had one-person exhibitions at the Pacific Asia Museum, the Long Beach Museum of Art, the Fresno Art Museum and the Museum of Contemporary Religious Art in St. Louis. Her works are in over 80 collections worldwide, including public collections in the United States, Japan, and Europe.