[2] Chu's works, influenced by the combination of eastern and western elements, create a "strong dichotomy between that which is modern and ancient, abstract and figurative, unknown and fantastical".

Despite being primarily a sculptor, "creating monumental works from wood, ceramic, and papier-mâché", “Chu also makes watercolors and monotypes”.

Chu's focus on art history has resulted in a singular vision, affecting her works which "place a contemporary sensibility in genuine dialogue with the past", giving an "ad hoc, but never excessively informal, sense of the present".

In deliberately remaking herself this way, Chu developed a unique visual language, celebrated in more than 30 solo exhibitions over a 25-year period".

Their symbolic gestures suggest that horses and their riders not only indicate an individual's status in ancient China, but also serve as a necessity for political survival.

Knowing Chu's "idiosyncratic color schemes", "the juxtaposition of yellow with lavender, red with olive green, and rose with chocolate brown" may refer to "a waterfall flowing through a rough mountain landscape, with the sun burning through a foggy morning".

Heads and hands are chopped from wood with a rough vigor that could be called violent if the characters’s storybookish dispositions weren't so benign.

The means through which they perceive the world are compromised by "eyes sometimes closed, sometimes only partially articulated and occasionally simply left as a pair of gouged holes".

"Even their incompleteness emphasizes their confinement to a world of material objects: wires spring out, seams show, and wood splinters or splits".

On the one hand, "Chu's sculptures argue for a secret life as a materials-oriented abstraction, the formalism disguised as vernacular figuration.

[9] "But Chu's big toys are suavely cosmopolitan with their ranging allusions and shifting identifications, their syncopated construction energies of cutting and stitching, their mix of high artifice and practicality.

We are invited to eavesdrop on lively conversations between Chu and the art of museums; their talk is intimate, affable, mischievous, and filled with affectionate expansiveness.

"While the bear has its own distinctive features — a waxy, blue, winking and slightly contorted face — its character depends on who tries it on for size and fills it with their presence".

As such, this art work, featuring an object, becomes far more than a "cast-resin pseudo-soft-sculpture creation", implying the animation of the lifeless through human intervention.