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.
Central to his practice is an interest in how families determine what is carried forward across generations and what is withheld or left unspoken. His relationship to his Zainichi Korean heritage was shaped by limited access to parts of his family history, informing his understanding of how migration, assimilation, and cultural erasure can shape what subsequent generations inherit. In fear of stigma and the consequences they may bring, many Zainichi Koreans concealed their original identities, even from their own children, opting to assimilate to Japanese culture.
Yamazaki's practice navigates through spectrums of obscurity, reflecting the pressures many immigrant families to remain unnoticed and the varying degrees of proximity of knowing one’s place and heritage through generations or memory. These veiled forms take shape in everyday objects and partially concealed figures of family members within real and imagined interiors. Through this visual interplay of absence and presence, the familiarity of domestic life, memory, and culture become choices of what is known and what remains lost.
His paintings often center interior spaces and everyday routines, drawing from memories both real and reimagined. Time spent in his family’s Japanese restaurant, which functioned as a formative home, recurs as a site where people gathered, worked, and intersected. This experience has informed his interest in sites of labor and cultural exchange, particularly how immigrant-owned businesses can become cultural hubs where traditions are preserved, adapted, and shared across generations and communities. Transmuting personal narrative into symbolic compositions, Yamazaki’s paintings become sites of longing and obfuscation, merging with the tenuous nature of what can be reclaimed and retrieved in diaspora. 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 has been shown in recent exhibitions at Volery Gallery, Dubai, Charlie James, Los Angeles, Jonathan Carver Moore, San Francisco, 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 has been an artist in residence at the Headlands Center for the Arts. 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.
