Artist Maya Fuji’s paintings reflect the straddled line of bicultural existence. In them, she asks the question of what makes us who we are.
Fuji was born in Kanazawa, Japan, and moved to Berkeley at a young age, spending her childhood attending elementary school and middle school in both countries. She currently lives in the Richmond district of San Francisco.
A mostly self-taught artist, Fuji dropped out of grad school while nearing completion of a CPA license to pursue her passion as a painter. With just a few screenprinting classes from City College of San Francisco and the Honolulu Museum of Art under her belt, Fuji aims to create colorful, narrative works that carry a sense of ancestral nostalgia.
“I love how welcoming the Bay Area arts community is. As a self-taught artist, I didn’t have much guidance on how to initiate my work being shown in galleries. I started by showing up at openings hoping to meet and engage with other artists. I’ve noticed how kind and supportive everyone has been, and I’ve made genuine friendships along the way,” Fuji told 48hills.
Though she is primarily a painter, Fuji says she enjoys immersing viewers into her shows through additional means. For a showing of a recent body of work at Charlie James Gallery in Los Angeles—her primary representative—Fuji created small washi (paper) sculptures that incorporated her personal collection of cicadas alongside a looping sound sample as part of the exhibition.
Fuji finds inspiration in the Ukiyo-e artists (a genre of Japanese art that flourished between the 17th and 19th centuries) and turns to the works of printmakers Tsukioka Yoshitoshi (1839-92) and Utagawa Kuniyoshi (1798-1861). One can sense, and Fuji confirms, that her work is also influenced by manga (contemporary comic book/graphic novel art from Japan), in particular that of cites Takahashi Rumiko and Araki Hirohiko. She also loves the photography work of Hosoe Eikoh.
“I like to intermingle my experiences in the Bay Area and Japan and show how both cultures can sometimes overlap, like decorative nail art, for example. I like to also celebrate femininity and its different body types as I have seen in the Bay Area as well,” she said.
Fuji says her visual language has developed as a means for storytelling, cultural discovery, and exploration of identity in works that are reflective of personal memories of childhood and being foreign in both Japanese and American societies.
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“Through these lived experiences, my work meditates on the ways ethnically mixed people, immigrants, and children of immigrants keep traditions alive while creating new ways of being in their new communities,” Fuji said.
Her preferred medium is acrylic paint, applying color with both paint brushes and airbrush. Fuji says she seeks to find the perfect balance where the two styles exist distinctly, but also harmoniously on the canvas.
“I feel like it creates a sort of tension, where the airbrushed elements pop out and stand in contrast to the rest of the painting. I often paint the spirits and human figures with airbrush, like the ghosts in the painting, A Cicada’s Lifecycle・蝉の一生 or the Tsukumogamis (spirits of old house hold objects) in Saudade・母の味,” she said.
A typical day in the creative world of Fuji begins in the late afternoon around three pm, painting until she feels she is physically spent from it, up to 10 to 12 hours on most days.
“I’ve noticed I like to work for long stretches of time rather than short, regimented sessions. Once I get going and am in the flow, time really does fly by. I’ve taken my eyes off the canvas and looked out the window to see the sunrise more often than I’d like to admit,” Fuji said.
Her usual practice space is her living room, though this past summer she was the recipient of the 2025 Tournesol Award with the Headlands Center for the Arts, which has provided her with a studio through July 2026.
“It’s the most space I’ve ever had to use as a studio and I’m very excited to see what I do with these giant walls. It also has these lovely windows facing out towards the hills in the Marin Headlands and I’ve been enjoying seeing the sunsets from them,” she said.
Her process begins with jottings and drawings from a notepad she keeps next to her bed to capture the roughest of initial sketches, ideas, inspiring quotes, and other tidbits of information.
“I often pull from it when conceptualizing my paintings, planning them out quite a bit before beginning. As for completion of a work, I usually know a piece is done when I feel like the composition and the colors are balanced and all the elements are painted in. However, sometimes I change course as I paint, and I just have to use my intuition to know when the painting is finished,” Fuji said.
Considering she initially viewed making art as a hobby; doing screenprinting and drawing for fun and dabbling in jewelry making for a short period of time, Fuji has made great and rapid strides since becoming more serious in 2020.
“After losing employment during the pandemic, I began using the free time to explore painting and completely fell in love. It became a way for me to explore my identity, but also a way to bring me closer to my family, here and in Japan. It gave me the opportunity to do more research about Japanese folklore, mythology, and legends, and helped me develop a deeper understanding of my own culture and history,” she said.
As a relative beginner, Fuji says she can feel her growth with every series of paintings she makes and strives to keep pushing herself to further develop a personal visual language.
“Some moments that really stuck with me over the years are the conversations I’ve had at my openings. People came and shared their own stories of immigration and assimilation, and I’ve often found that there are more similarities in cross-cultural experiences than differences. I always feel very honored for the opportunity to share my experiences through my paintings and to have people resonate with them and share their own stories with me,” she said.
About three years ago, Fuji began a project recreating her grandmother’s home in Japan through paintings, after losing it to a fire.
“It was the one place I could call home in Japan. The project began as a way to memorialize my grandmother’s legacy while exploring how one could stay connected to a culture and country from abroad,” she said.
This October, she will be presenting the final rendition of this project at Glass Rice Gallery in San Francisco, where she will integrate a virtual reality experience alongside paintings capturing her grandmother’s altar room. After securing funding for an individual artist grant from the San Francisco Arts Commission, Fuji began a collaboration with Storm Griffith, a VR game designer, for that portion of the exhibit.
“The experience will feature the ability to virtually step into my paintings and explore the family home I and my ancestors once lived in. When proposing this project, I imagined us humans inhabiting the physical realm, while spirits inhabited the spiritual realm. I then wondered whether spirits would be about to enter the digital realm, in the cloud, where this VR experience would eventually live. Would I be able to meet my grandmother’s spirit in her virtual reality home?” Fuji said.
In addition to the upcoming October project, recent exhibitions include the solo show, Igokochi・居心地, at Charlie James Gallery this past January. Fuki will also be showing work in the CJG booth at Art Basel Miami in December. Fuji is included in the group show Living Here at Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art in Las Vegas, which runs through December 20.
As she dives deeper into her work, Maya Fuji thinks her younger self would be surprised and delighted that she is finally pursuing her passion and being able to support herself.
“While I am not a full-time artist yet, I feel that I have been able to create the perfect balance of work, studio time, and social life. After seeing my parents struggle as artists, I never thought I could achieve this, which is why I had initially pursued a safer career choice. I feel very blessed to be able to do what I love!” she said.
And she hopes that her paintings will resonate with viewers, that her work invokes nostalgic memories of our own childhoods. Moreover, she wants stories like her own to be heard, to provide answers to that question of what makes us who we are.
“I think that now more than ever, with voices of minorities and underrepresented communities being silenced by this current regime, it’s extremely important for diasporic artists to share their experiences and voices through their artwork,” Fuji said.
For more information, visit her website mayafuji.com and her Instagram profile.
