OSATO・お里
Glass Rice is proud to present Osato / Quiet Conversations, an immersive exhibition by Maya Fuji featuring paintings by Shingo Yamazaki. The word “Osato” translates to one’s origins, past, or upbringing - serving as the connective thread between both artists’ meditations on heritage, identity, and memory.
In this exhibition, Fuji reimagines her grandmother’s home in Japan through a combination of paintings and a virtual reality installation, weaving together the tactile and the digital to give life to all the fragments and textures that make up memory.
In her largest painting, two nude women are intertwined on the tatami floor of a traditional Japanese living room - one gently cleaning the ear of the other as she rests in her lap. Surrounding them, ancestral photographs, spiritual icons, and recreations of the artist’s grandmother’s keepsakes populate the space, infusing the painting with both familiar tenderness and reverence. Drawing on ukiyo-e aesthetics and traditional Japanese motifs, Fuji merges these elements with her lived experience as a mixed-race Japanese-American woman in the Bay Area into each of her paintings. She meditates on what it means to live between cultures - where myth, environment, and the dualities of identity converge to form new expressions of belonging.
Developed in collaboration with VR artist Storm Griffith (Obstinate), the exhibition extends into a virtual realm. In the gallery’s back room, visitors are invited to enter a digital environment mirroring the world of Fuji’s paintings - a meta-experience allowing viewers to inhabit the landscape of Fuji’s recollections.
Alongside Fuji’s immersive work, Yamazaki presents paintings that mirror and extend the exhibition’s central themes of hybridity, displacement, and the layered meaning of home. Born in Honolulu to Japanese parents with Korean lineage, Yamazaki’s practice explores the condition of in-betweenness as both a generative and melancholic state. As a second-generation Japanese and Korean American without full access to his Zainichi (Koreans living in Japan) lineage, he examines how fragmented histories are reconstituted into sincere meaning through imagination, longing, and everyday ritual.
Yamazaki’s quiet interior scenes layer figures, domestic motifs, and nostalgic objects in translucent washes of paint, revealing and concealing in equal measure. Japanese and Korean references intermingle with memories of Hawai’i - floral shirts, retro televisions, sticky notes in Japanese set against the backdrop of his family’s restaurant, a space that functioned as both workplace and home. Elsewhere, a woman tends to her plant behind a bookshelf adorned with prayer beads and keepsakes. These works present home as a living archive, reflecting on what to carry forward, what to leave behind, and what to reimagine for the future.
Together, Fuji and Yamazaki create a quiet yet profound dialogue about migration, belonging, and the spaces that hold our histories. Osato / Quiet Conversations invites viewers to move between interior and ancestral worlds, to dwell in the liminal spaces where memory lingers, and to consider how stories of the past continue to shape the ways we make, and remake, home.