Shingo Yamazaki’s paintings examine diasporic identity, cultural hybridity, and the shifting meanings of home. Influenced by his upbringing in Hawaiʻi and his current home in Los Angeles, his work reflects on what it means to live between cultures, and how belonging can feel both familiar and foreign. As a Japanese and Korean American shaped in part by his family’s Zainichi history, referring to Koreans living in Japan across generations under Japanese occupation, Yamazaki considers what is preserved, what is hidden, and what becomes difficult to access within family histories.
Yamazaki's practice navigates diasporic experiences of in-betweenness, where presence and absence coexist through thinly veiled transparencies that obscure visibility, reflecting the pressure many immigrant families feel to remain unnoticed. His paintings often center interior spaces and everyday routines, drawing from memories both real and reimagined. Time spent in his parents’ Japanese restaurant, which functioned as a formative home, recurs as a site where people gathered, worked, and intersected. Across his work, family members, friends, sentimental objects, and traditions appear as markers of cultural exchange, reflecting how identities evolve as they move through time, place, and belonging.
Yamazaki studied at the University of Hawai’i at Mānoa and received a Bachelors of Arts focused in Painting. His work is has been shown in a recent exhibitions at Volery Gallery, Dubai, Sow & Tailor, Los Angeles, Steven Zevitas Gallery , Boston, and Richard Heller Gallery, Los Angeles. Yamazaki has been a recipient of the Innovate grant, finalist for the Hopper Prize, and won the First Place Award for the Association of Hawai’i Artists “Aloha Show.” He has been featured recently in publications such as Flux Magazine Issue 45, New American Paintings Issue 163, BOOOOOOOM 'Tomorrow's Talent' volume II, and Friend of the Artist Volume 13. Shingo currently lives and works in Los Angeles.
