Maya Fuji explores cultural hybridity through her experiences of being an issei (first-generation Japanese), mixed-race woman in the United States. Drawing upon mythology and folklore and referencing the Showa era, Heisei era, and Bay Area subcultures, she embodies the shift in tradition that she’s witnessed within her family and community after immigrating to the states.

Peaceful, domestic scenes of women relaxing in total comfort are common in Fuji’s paintings. Her nude figures exist communally, untethered from social norms of nakedness and shame of one’s own bodies. Like spirits, the scenes embody both joy and grief, celebration and loss, and are framed by activities and memories of a traditional Japanese household.

Fuji explores the evolution of how one’s sense of identity is formed in a diasporic generation living abroad; reflecting back are the intersections of her experience as a multicultural, multinational, multiracial woman. Her paintings portray nostalgia as childhood memories, in tandem with feelings of being a foreigner in both Japanese and American communities. She contemplates how ethnically mixed people, immigrants, and children of immigrants retain practices and traditions as their habits shift and morph, often re-emerging as new ways of being.