Location: San Francisco, CA
Medium: Painting, public art (murals)
Website: instagram.com/chadhasegawa
Chad Hasegawa was born in 1983 in Honolulu, Hawaii, where he grew up drawn to graffiti and the loose, figurative energy of San Francisco’s Mission School painters. He moved to San Francisco in 2000 to study at the Academy of Art University, earning a BFA in advertising and going on to work as a designer for agencies including Goodby Silverstein & Partners and Venables Bell & Partners.
Hasegawa eventually left commercial advertising to paint full time, developing a reputation for large-scale murals and canvases made with inexpensive latex house paint and oversized brushes — a resourceful, thrifty approach carried over from his graffiti-influenced beginnings. He served as an Artist in Residence with Recology San Francisco in 2013, working with material recovered from the city’s waste stream, and returned to a museum setting in 2016 as an Artist-in-Residence at the de Young Museum, where he painted large-scale portraits of artists who influenced him — including Keith Haring, Chuck Close, Joan Mitchell, and Ai Weiwei — as part of the museum’s “Self-Portrait” residency program. He has kept a studio in the Mission District through decades of neighborhood change.
In the years since, Hasegawa’s practice has shifted from figurative portraiture and his signature abstracted bear paintings toward a harder-edged, more minimal abstraction, with paintings built from precise planes of color. He is represented by Heron Arts and Good Mother Gallery in the Bay Area, and his work has been shown at galleries and art fairs in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York.
Hasegawa’s early and best-known body of work centers on the bear: an aggressively scaled, abstracted brown form built from dense, wild brushstrokes that read as both figure and gesture. He has described the bear paintings as protective figures — for himself and for viewers — drawing on the animal’s recurring role as an ancestral or guardian spirit across cultures. That work sits alongside portraits of artists he admires, rendered with the same loose, Abstract Expressionist-influenced brushwork, citing Vincent van Gogh, Keith Haring, Franz Kline, and the New York School as touchstones.
More recently his paintings have moved toward minimalism: hard-edged planes of color, repeated forms, and pared-down compositions influenced as much by parking-lot line painters and mid-century automobiles as by painters like Agnes Martin. Across both bodies of work, Hasegawa favors inexpensive materials — latex house paint chief among them — treating those constraints as a generative part of the process rather than a limitation, and testing how little information a painting needs before it still reads as a coherent feeling or story.
This entry was written by the Bay Area Artist Wiki project and is based on publicly available information.
Claim this page → to update your own profile.