Craig Nagasawa is a Berkeley-based painter whose work engages Japanese American histories through material processes including nihonga-influenced hand-ground mineral-pigment painting, charcoal drawing, performance video, and animation. His practice explores family histories, cultural rupture, and migration while refusing erasure through humor, visual storytelling, and open-ended creative production.
Presented at UC Berkeley, where Nagasawa taught for three decades, this exhibition features his recent work, the result of a sustained inquiry into materials and identity, while also including earlier hand-ground mineral-pigment paintings that document the development of his technique and thematic concerns. These are presented alongside new, experimental process-based works that center the ways his pigments and media naturally interact on paper.
Brought up in Salt Lake City’s Japantown, where three generations of his family ran Sunrise Fish Market before the neighborhood was demolished and the community scattered in 1968, Nagasawa has long confronted the ongoing legacy of incarceration, dispossession, and oppression faced by his Japanese American community. He is known for his deep engagement with traditional Japanese nihonga painting techniques, gathering raw minerals during excursions in the American West. Grounded in everyday lived experience, his work offers alternatives to dominant narratives of American history, and just as importantly, creates a space where Nagasawa can simply be himself.
This story remains central in Japan Town: Sunrise Fish Market (2022), a large charcoal-on-paper drawing depicting the family business from both the street and interior perspectives, collapsing time and generational stories into a single image. Throughout the broader Japantown series (2020–22), Nagasawa creates delicate works that draw from his early memories. As in earlier paintings, Gojira appears as a stand-in for himself and as a way of confronting racial stereotypes, bringing a sense of play to compositions that also acknowledge more menacing remnants of World War II - the atomic bomb, and the othering of Japanese Americans. This work distills memories of childhood into a composition also filled with joy and humor, depicting the everyday community life that endures alongside histories of erasure.
craignagasawa.com