Until 1 September 2025, Volery Gallery is hosting Mauka to Makai, a solo exhibition by Shingo Yamazaki. Showcasing his newest paintings, the exhibition delves into themes of identity, memory, and place through richly layered compositions.
Titled after Hawaiian directional terms (mauka meaning “toward the mountains” and makai meaning “toward the ocean”), the exhibition draws on localised ways of orienting oneself within the landscape. For Yamazaki, this serves as a cultural reference and a metaphor for navigating internal and external geographies, personal and collective histories.
The displayed paintings blend elements of domestic interiors with natural topographies, creating dreamlike environments where memory and lived experience overlap. Architectural details dissolve into organic forms, and within these transitional spaces, figures inspired by loved ones appear quiet and introspective. Partially veiled, they hover between visibility and disappearance.
Yamazaki builds his compositions through successive layers of translucent glaze. Thus, he creates surfaces which evoke the fragmented and fleeting nature of memory. They act like veils, echoing the way recollections can blur or crystallise with time. Rather than presenting a single narrative, the artist invites viewers into a composite world shaped by erosion, reconstruction, and reinterpretation.
Born in Honolulu and currently residing in Los Angeles, Yamazaki reflects on the fluidity of cultural belonging and generational memory. Mauka to Makai presents home not as a fixed point but as something constantly redefined: shaped by longing, fragmentation, and the intermingling of past and present. The result is a poignant body of work that embraces ambiguity and multiplicity, allowing different versions of self and place to coexist in a state of continuous becoming.
About the artist
Shingo Yamazaki (b. 1985, Honolulu, Hawai‘i) is a Korean-Japanese American artist whose work examines the psychological dimensions of home, memory, and cultural hybridity. He earned his BA in Painting from the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa in 2014.
Yamazaki’s atmospheric paintings blend domestic architecture with natural landscapes, constructing liminal spaces where personal and collective histories intersect. His use of veil-like glazes, softened figures, and layered compositions evokes the fragmented, evolving nature of memory and identity shaped by migration and distance.
His works has been featured in multiple solo and collective exhibitions, such as Art Busan Art Fair (Tang Contemporary, Busan, Korea, 2024); Horizons (Sow & Tailor Pop Up, Wan Chai, Hong Kong, 2023); a solo presentation at Sow and Tailor Gallery (LA, California, 2022); and Waterkeepers (Pauahi Tower, Honolulu, Hawai’i, 2019), among others.
Yamazaki’s accolades include being named a finalist and honourable mention for the MyMa Artist Grant (2024), a finalist for The Hopper Prize (2022), and recipient of the Innovate Grant (2022), to name a few.
To learn more about Mauka to Makai, please go to the exhibition’s official web page.
You might also be interested in visiting Garden of Murmurs by Malik Thomas Jalil Kydd.
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