Location: San Francisco, CA
Medium: Painting, mixed media
Website: mayafuji.com
Maya Fuji (b. 1988, Kanazawa, Japan) is a Japanese American painter based in San Francisco. She immigrated to Berkeley, California as a child and spent her formative years moving between Kanazawa and the Bay Area. Largely self-taught, she earned a BBA from San Francisco State University and briefly pursued a master’s degree in accounting before pivoting to art full-time after pandemic-related job loss in 2020. Her parents are both artists, and her path back to painting was, in many ways, a return to an inherited sensibility.
Fuji has received significant recognition for her work, including the Headlands Center for the Arts Tournesol Award (2025), a Fleishhacker Foundation Eureka Fellowship (2026–2028), the Innovate Artist Grant, and an SFAC Artist Grant. She was nominated for the SFMoMA SECA Award in 2023. Her work entered the permanent collection of the Crocker Art Museum, and she has been featured in publications including New American Paintings, KQED Arts, 48 Hills, and It’s Nice That.
Fuji works primarily with acrylic paint on canvas and wood panels, combining brushwork and airbrushing to generate visual tension between soft and graphic mark-making. She incorporates materials that straddle craft and fine art — rhinestones, eyeliner, silver and gold leaf, washi paper, gofun, gouache, and sumi ink — layering them to produce paintings dense with texture and cultural reference. Her compositions center female figures rendered in luminous color palettes drawn from traditional Japanese woodblock prints and the saturated aesthetics of Showa and Heisei popular culture.
Conceptually, her practice investigates the liminal space of being an issei (first-generation) mixed-race woman in the United States. She draws on Shinto cosmology — particularly the concepts of Tsukumogami (household objects that acquire spirits over centuries) and Yaoyorozu no Kami (the ten thousand gods inhabiting all things) — and reimagines these frameworks within Bay Area settings. Through recurring motifs of folklore, subcultural nostalgia, and bicultural memory, Fuji explores how traditions transform across generations of migration, and how the immigrant imagination reconstructs belonging from fragments of two worlds.
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.