Artist behind SHIIGA – Norico Chua
Profile
Norico Chua is a Japanese artist based in Malaysia whose work explores what it means to live between cultures, places, and identities.
Having lived in Japan, the United States, and Malaysia, her experience as an immigrant has deeply shaped her artistic world. Her work grows from the subtle spaces between cultures and worlds — places that are neither entirely one thing nor another, but exist somewhere beautifully in-between.
Today, Norico lives surrounded by the mist, forests, and flowers of the Cameron Highlands. Here, the rhythms of nature intertwine with memories of distant places, shaping surreal worlds inhabited by mysterious beings, quiet figures, distant kingdoms, stars, moons, and flowers.
At the heart of her practice is SHIIGA — Norico Chua’s own way of naming her approach to 詩画 (shiga), a Japanese form in which poetry and visual art come together. In her work, poetry is not simply a caption for an image, nor is the image merely an illustration of a poem. They are created as one expression.
Through SHIIGA, Norico explores identity, memory, loss, belonging, and transformation — the fragile and beautiful experiences of living in-between.
Artist Statement
Rooted in her own experience as an immigrant living between cultures, her work is a quiet exploration of identity, memory, belonging, loss, and transformation. She is drawn to the spaces that exist between places and identities — the uncertain territories where we may feel that we belong to more than one world, yet completely to none.
For Norico, mysterious beings and surreal landscapes are not an escape from reality. They are a natural reflection of life on the borderlands. Recurring motifs such as stars, the moon, quiet forests, distant kingdoms, and flowers become emotional landscapes where loneliness, longing, memory, and complex identities can take form.
Her figures are neither heroes nor saviors. They are beautiful, imperfect beings of the threshold — wandering, struggling, loving, and losing their way. They carry their own wounds as they move through darkness, searching for small and precious moments of light.
Through the inseparable union of poetry and image, Norico seeks to create a space where language and visual expression meet, and where personal memories can become something shared.
Her work asks a quiet question:
What does it mean to belong, when you have lived between worlds?
Her symbol, a quiet red circle, reflects her Japanese roots and carries a gentle flame—a silent light meant to warm those wandering through their own dark nights.
Selected Exhibitions
2024
SELANGOR INTERNATIONAL BOOKFARE
MBBY, Setia City Convention Centre
Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia
Group Exhibition
2022
POWER OF STORIES
MBBY, Kompleks Perbadanan Putrajaya
Putrajaya, Malaysia
Group Exhibition
2020
YOKAI NEIGHBOURS
AG Gallery
Brooklyn, New York, USA
Group Exhibition – Works sold
2020
Group Exhibition
Universiti Malaya
Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia
Published Books
A Cake Reaching to the Sky
Malaysia, 2013
Republished in Malaysia, 2015
Philippines, 2015
Korea, 2018
The Werewolf and His Moon
Malaysia, 2014
The Yellow Lion and the Blue Lion
Malaysia, 2015
Malay Edition, 2021
The Rocket Caterpillar
Malaysia, 2017
The Moonlight Princess
Malaysia, 2017
Nowhereland
Illustration & Poetry
Malaysia, 2021
Media
2014 : Featured in the STAR(Malaysia)
2018 : Interviews for “UNLOCK JAPAN”(Singapore)
2020 : Selected for Artbook of Selected Illustration (105 Illustrators)
2020 : Interviewed for SENYUM (Malaysia)
2020 : Interviewed on CitiPlus FM
2022 – Present : Began a regular Shiiga column in Sin Chew Daily (Malaysia)
2022 : Featured in the documentary “Malaysia in Their Eyes” (ASTRO AEC)
2022 : Featured in the web documentary “So Here I Am” by Sin Chew Daily