ABOUT
Photo Credit: Fran Tamse
BIO
Maya Fuji (b. 1988 Kanazawa, Japan) is a self taught artist who shifted careers midway through her MBA program to pursue her passion in visual arts and painting. Fuji immigrated to Berkeley, CA at an early age, and spent her early years spending time back and forth between Kanazawa and Berkeley. She currently lives and works out of San Francisco.
Fuji has had solo exhibitions at Charlie James Gallery, LA, YOD Gallery, Osaka, and SWIM Gallery, SF. Recent group exhibitions include New Image Art LA, Glass Rice SF, Good Mother Gallery Oakland/LA, The Hole NY, Charlie James LA, and Tiro Al Blanco Mexico. Fuji’s work is in the permanent collection of the Crocker Art Museum, and has been featured in publications such as New American Paintings, Friend Of The Artist, Artmaze Mag, Metal Magazine, It’s Nice That, and Immigrantly Podcast. Awards include the Innovate Grant and the SFAC Artist Grant, and she was nominated for the SFMoMA SECA Award in 2023. Fuji has participated in residencies at Wassaic Projects and Virginia Center For The Creative Arts. She is currently represented by Charlie James Gallery in Los Angeles.
STATEMENT
Through painting and traditional Mingei craft, Maya Fuji explores the liminal space of being an issei (first-generation Japanese) mixed-race woman in the US. Her work embodies the way she has experienced shifts in tradition within her family and community after immigrating to the Bay Area. Inspired by mythology and folklore, she also references Showa, Heisei, and Bay Area subcultures.
Her paintings portray nostalgic memories of childhood and the feelings of being foreign in both Japanese and American communities. Through these lived experiences, her work meditates on the ways ethnically mixed people, immigrants, and children of immigrants keep traditions alive while creating new ways of living.
Fuji investigates the mythological animism of the Tsukumogami and Yaoyorozu No Kami, highlighting the dualistic nature of her cultural experiences. While Tsukumogami are household objects that obtain a spirit over a century (first depicted in the Hyakkiyakō Emaki scrolls of the Muromachi period around 1336~1573), Yaoyorozu No Kami are drawn from the Shinto belief that gods reside in everything in this world. She envisions the spirits immigrating to the US with her family and how they would exist within her own experiences growing up in the Bay Area during the 90s and early 2000s, intersecting potent cultural and technological references to a time period globalizing the worlds we reside in.