KAILI CHUN Nau ka wae #41 (The Choice Belongs to You), 2006 basalt 9 x 5 x 4 inches approx. Price: $500 Courtesy of the artist   Nau ka wae #42 (The Choice Belongs to You), 2006 basalt 6 x 6 x 4 inches approx. Price: $500 Courtesy of the artist

Kaili Chun was born in 1962 in Honolulu, where she continues to live and work. She received her BA in Architecture in 1986 from Princeton University, where she had an opportunity to work with celebrated Hawai‘i-born ceramic sculptor Toshiko Takaezu. Chun returned to the islands, and later received her MFA from the University of Hawai‘i at Manoa. She also apprenticed with noted canoe builder and woodworker Wright Elemakule Bowman, Sr. She currently teaches at Kapi‘olani Community College, and was the recipient of the Catherine E. B. Cox Award from the Honolulu Academy of Arts in 2006. In 2003 she was featured in The Contemporary Museum’s sixth biennial of Hawai‘i artists.

Chun is noted for her work as a conceptual sculptor, creating complex installations that address issues of indigenous culture and the quest to maintain its integrity in the presence of non-native cultural influences. Nau ka wae (The Choice Belongs to You),her most recent installation, exhibited at the Honolulu Academy of Arts, is the source of this small sculpture of stone and wood, one of forty that marked the perimeter. The stone contains a hollow in which a small image is embedded; it is capped with a carved stopper of alahe‘e wood that is inscribed with related text.