Onye Kwe, Chi Ya Ekwe, ''My God Affirms, When I Agree": Chi, Creativity, and Cosmic Nexus in the Art and Thought of Chiagoziem Nneamaka Orji: The Way of the Calabash 5 Part 1

 

 

Image from Chiagoziem Nneamaka Orji's Facebook Post of March 6, 2025, and X post of the same date titled  Onye Kwe, Chi Ya Ekwe 

Self as Cosmos​ in the Self Portraits of Chiagoziem Orji

This book uses a self portrait by the artist Chiagoziem Nneamaka Chivụzọ Orji​, Onye Kwe, Chi Ya Ekwe, ''My God Affirms, When I Agree​'', as an entry into the philosophical and spiritual scope of her art and thought, demonstrating it as an exploration of the individualistically cultural and yet universal resonance of classical Igbo arts and philosophies.

​Through a combination of photography and digital inscription​, ​Orji develops self portraiture, one of the most powerful forms of art ​across time and space, into ​one of the visually richest and symbolically resonant expressive forms of ​h​er multi-media art​.

She takes a picture of herself, often focused on her face or limited to her face​,and draws on the image of ​t​he face in the picture. She may also create a visual network around her​ form in the p​h​otograph. Other pictures show inscriptions created directly on diverse parts of her body​ before the picture is taken. The mood of the images may be joyous, playful, poised or contemplative.

The entire sequence, carried out continually ​a​cross years on her Facebook and X ​accounts, is ​ playful​ and yet profound in its ideational associations, a person enjoying the freedom of exploring the symbols and ethos of the Uli tradition of body art from her Igbo culture.

Onye Kwe, Chi Ya Ekwe

​The focus of this book is Orji's multimedia creativity in Onye Kwe, Chi Ya Ekwe, ''My God Affirms, When I Agree​'', composed of photography and digital inscription​s.

​The work offers a profound visual meditation on the Igbo concept of chi—the personal divine essence and guardian force that embodies each individual’s unique connection to the Creator.

By balancing a calabash on her head, the artist evokes chi as the wellspring of consciousness, creativity, and life propulsion. Delicate tendrils, roots, radiate from this vessel, tracing pathways of spiritual energy across her face and eyes, linking Igbo Odinani cosmology with universal ideas of inner vision, chakras, and the transformative power of perception.

Th​e​ evocative force of the image bridg​es fate and free will, physical and spiritual sight, and the dynamic forces of the god and goddess Agwu and Anyanwu (creativity and inspiration). It celebrates the human being as a microcosm where infinite divine potentials intersect with embodied existence, inviting viewers to contemplate the hidden capacities of sight, imagination, and speech in navigating life’s possibilities.

Interspersed within the main text ​in this book are images of other works of Orji's​, at times complemented by discussions of those works, demonstrating how they complement Onye Kwe, Chi Ya Ekwe.

This critical piece concludes with a story composed by myself, responding to the imaginative creativity inspired in me by Orji's art and thought, a story that is part of the narrative sequence I name The Way of the Calabash.

The Inspirational Orbit of Orji's Art and Thought

This is perhaps the first in-depth study of Orji's work, integrating into a seamless whole major strands of her art and writings dispersed across her Facebook and X accounts and demonstrating the potential of her art and thought for mapping an approach to studying and practising her understanding of indigenous Igbo philosophy and spirituality.

Orji's art is attractive of such study because of its thematic depth, evocative power and technical mastery, its force amplified by the scintillating penetration of her thought and the rich lucidity of its verbal expression, placing her amongst the galaxy of stars of the Nsukka art school in Nigeria, where she studied, and within the firmament of African art and thought, resonating in rhythm with great masters in spiritual thought, philosophy and art across time and space.

The ecological cosmicisations of the 19th century Dutch/French artist Vincent van Gogh, complemented by his rich verbal dramatisations of his artistic quest;

the movement from his Urhobo cultural universe to a pan-Nigerian expressive world, resonating with African creativities beyond his national frame as he composes sublime visualizations ranging from the everyday to the cosmological represented by the 20th-21st century contemporary artist Bruce Onobrakpeya, a journey relentlessly documented in various books;

the transformation of the visual intelligence of the Nsibidi symbolism of his native Cross-River in Nigeria in generating a universally resonant expressive cosmos by 20th-21st century artist Victor Ekpuk;

20th-21st century German artist Anselm Kiefer's multimedia wrestlings with the intersection of the cosmological and the historical at the confluence of German and Jewish histories and cultures, as in his Shevirath he Kelim, the Breaking of the Vessels​-

all resonate with the work of Orji, a young 20th-21st century artist ( born 1997) who demonstrates a similar sensitivity to the conjunction of the everyday and the cosmological, the material and the spiritual, projecting her immersion in the artistic, spiritual and philosophical realities of her native Igbo culture in a manner that amplifies the spiritual, philosophical and artistic achievements of cognate Nigerian cultures, resonating with related ideational and artistic creativities across geographies and history.

Sources Used in this Book and the Book's Mode of Publication

The primary sources of ​O​rji's work in this study of her art and writing being drawn purely from social media signals the emergence of a new frontier in the study of art, as the global digital information revolution makes its mark on the presentation and study of the art world.

Traditionally, art historians construct interpretations from museum collections, exhibition catalogues, archival documents, and published criticism. In this work on Orji, however, much of the primary material comes from ​her Facebook and X posts, complemented by essays and images distributed across other digital platforms​.

This book is also published solely on social media for now. I describe it as a book on account of its volume, above 40,000 words.

This work thus participates in an emerging mode of scholarship that future historians of art may increasingly practice: the reconstruction of an artist's expressive universe from a dispersed digital archive and the publication of books resulting therefrom on social media.

In that sense, this project is doing three things simultaneously:

1. It is helping to establish Chiagoziem Orji as a significant contemporary thinker and artist.

2. It is demonstrating a new methodology for intellectual and art-historical scholarship in the digital age.

3. It is also actualizing a new approach to book publishing.

This work is correlative with how such scholars as Rowland Abiodun in Yoruba Art and Language: Seeking the African in African Art, approach Yoruba art—not as illustration, decoration, or ethnographic artifact, but as philosophy embodied in visual form. Orji's work invites a similar treatment. Her paintings, drawings, writings, and self-portraits are not simply images accompanied by ideas; they are ideas thinking themselves through images.

This project is thus not merely a study of an individual artist, but a contribution to the broader understanding of how contemporary artists generate, preserve, and transmit philosophical knowledge through visual culture and how the study of this process and its outcomes may be published through the same or related social digital platforms the artists use.