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 and duo exhibitions at Charlie James Gallery (CA), YOD Gallery (Osaka), and Glass Rice Gallery (CA). Recent group exhibitions include Marjorie Barrick Museum (NV), Asia Society (TX), Crocker Art Museum (CA) The Hole (NY), 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 KQED Arts, 48 Hills, New American Paintings, Friend Of The Artist, Artmaze Mag, Metal Magazine, It’s Nice That, and Immigrantly Podcast. Awards include the Headlands Center For The Arts Tournesol Award, Fleishhaker Foundation Eureka Fellow, Innovate Grant, and the SFAC Artist Grant. She has participated in residencies at Fountainhead Residency, 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 Japanese craft, Maya Fuji explores how traditions shift through migration and across generations. Drawing from her experience immigrating from Kanazawa, Japan to the San Francisco Bay Area, her work considers the ways ethnically mixed people, immigrants, and children of immigrants maintain cultural traditions while adapting them to new environments and circumstances.
Inspired by mythology, folklore, and drawing references from traditional Ukiyo-e paintings, Fuji investigates the mythological animism of Tsukumogami and Yaoyorozu No Kami, highlighting the dualistic nature of her cultural experiences. While Tsukumogami are household objects that obtain spirits over a century, Yaoyorozu No Kami are drawn from the Shinto belief that gods reside in all things, including nature and schools of thought. She envisions these spirits immigrating alongside her family and existing within her own experiences growing up in the Bay Area during the 90s and early 2000s.
Her work draws connections between Shōwa and Heisei-era Japan and Bay Area subcultures, reflecting on a period when new technologies increasingly connected distant places and cultures. Through these imagined encounters, she considers how inherited traditions persist, transform, and find new forms of expression far from their place of origin.