Living Here

Maya Fuji
Double Belonging, 2024
Acrylic, silver and gold leaf on canvas
Courtesy of the artist and Charlie James Gallery

This work is on loan for the exhibition, Living Here, at the Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art, June 20 - December 20, 2025

“The longer I spend time in the U.S. I’ve noticed the way certain habits have shifted and morphed, often re-emerging as new ways of being. I often surprise myself by the unexpected ways certain parts of each culture have taken root within me,” Maya Fuji said during an interview with Artsin Square. In her paintings she visualizes the story of that shifting, morphing experience.

Growing up biracial, she attended school in both California’s Bay Area and Kanazawa in western Japan. Double Belonging is inspired by fragments of the wooden Buddhist altar that she brought from her late grandmother’s house in Kanazawa to her home in the United States. By replacing the original picture of Buddhist monks with a group of her women holding up a Kaga Hachiman Okiagari—a figure from Japan’s other official religion, Shintoism—Fuji shows us that a whole, complete form can be made up of things that espouse doubleness, and that have “shifted and morphed.” Cultural migration takes on a physical shape. Can the spirits migrate, just like people? Or do they only stay in Japanese homes? The question is heightened by the knowledge that these spirits are traditionally formed by the accumulated energy of families living in a single place for years.