Location: Oakland, CA
Medium: Painting, Sculpture, Installation, Film, Video, Sound, Printmaking
Justin Caguiat was born in 1989 in Tokyo, Japan, and spent his formative years moving across Tokyo, Yokohama, Hong Kong, Jakarta, and Manila before relocating to North America. A self-described peripatetic, he has supported his practice through work as a welder, prop maker, fabricator, and preparator. He lives and works between Oakland, California and New York City.
Caguiat’s work has entered the collections of major institutions including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, the Dallas Museum of Art, and the Hessel Museum of Art at Bard College. His paintings were acquired by SFMOMA as part of a focus on Bay Area artists. In 2026, the CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts in San Francisco presented The Tramp, his and Rafael Delacruz’s first institutional exhibition on the West Coast, featuring a newly commissioned 16mm film shot across Oakland and Half Moon Bay.
In addition to his visual art practice, Caguiat is a published poet — his collection A RAT, A DOG, A BOY was published by Codette in 2017 — and has performed at venues including Kunsthalle Zürich.
Caguiat works across painting, sculpture, installation, 16mm film, sound, and printmaking. He is best known for large-scale paintings on unstretched linen or canvas, pinned directly to the wall, layered in oil, gouache, pastel, and acrylic. His surfaces are dense and aqueous, with figures, neural networks, fragmented bodies, and decorative motifs dissolving into patterned grounds. He has described the paintings as “liminal” — resisting instantaneous reading and demanding time to decipher — and some works incorporate reactive materials such as heat-activated thermochromic pigments and oxidizing silver leaf that change over time in response to their environment.
Caguiat’s visual language synthesizes an unusually wide range of influences: the flattened forms of manga and Japanese woodblock prints, the folk-baroque fusions of Filipino Catholic iconography, the jewel-box modernism of the Vienna Secession, 1960s psychedelia, Symbolist painting, science fiction literature, and the aesthetics of his 1990s Tokyo childhood. His practice extends across mediums and disciplines — exhibitions often incorporate 16mm film, sound works, and poetic texts that function not as explanations but as extensions of his visual world.
This entry was written by the Bay Area Artist Wiki project and is based on publicly available information.
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