Oct 16 – Dec 6, 2025
Using materials as disparate as Sumi ink, blood, and spit, Makoto Chi creates images of yokai and golems as an exploration of queerness, myth, and cultural heritage. Twelve new pieces, presented kakejiku-style throughout SUM gallery, complement a mural painted directly onto the gallery’s east wall.
Join us for the opening reception on October 16. Please note: to accommodate members of our community, from 5 – 6pm the Opening Reception will be masks mandatory; from 6pm to closing the reception will be masks recommended. Masks and hand sanitizer will be provided at the reception desk.
Further please join us for a “Make Your Own Yokai” linocut print workshop + artist talk on October 25, presented in partnership with Powell Street Festival Society. Workshop participation is 18+.
ABOUT MAKOTO CHI
Makoto Chi is a visual artist, born and raised in Canada and currently based in Western Massachusetts. His formal training and practice span tattooing, drawing, and painting, with forays into sculpture and installation. These disciplines cross-pollinate, merging tattoo motifs, illustrative narrative, and linework-heavy figuration into a personal visual language.
His work centres monstrous and chimeric figures as stand-ins for inner psychological landscapes, experiences, and observations around the communities he inhabits. Entangled in ambiguous, libidinous states of conflict and intimacy, figuration is a site for Makoto to explore queer eros, ritual, diasporic longing for placeness, and liminal thresholds between tenderness and brutality. He refracts witnessed experiences and inherited stories through the lens of hybridity and self-invention, while creating space for viewers to locate themselves within the work.
Makoto’s practice is deeply informed by the visual cultures, mythologies, and spiritualities of his Japanese and Ashkenazi Jewish heritages, as well as his queer, gendered experiences. In these intertwined histories—marked paradoxically by exile, internment, and grave violence—he finds fertile ground for reimagining. The erotic charge within anthropomorphic and hybrid bodies becomes a means to rupture traditional narratives, re-knitting severed connections with familial ancestorhood and generating new, unexpected meanings.
While his work is shaped by identity, it is not bound to it. He seeks to communicate across cultural boundaries, engage with the possibilities and contradictions of freedom of movement, and dwell in the generative space of in-betweenness.
Makoto graduated from Emily Carr University with a BFA in Illustration in 2015. He has been tattooing since 2004/05, and currently lives at Lupinewood Collective, a majority trans, all-queer intentional collective living project in Western Massachusetts.
