Shingo Yamazaki
Shingo Yamazaki is an artist whose work revolves around themes of identity, cultural hybridity, and the definition of home. His paintings are reconstructed memories and remnants of the past, in which mark its existence from his personal history. Yamazaki’s work allows the home to become a vessel of collective identity through dialogues of everyday life. The work is a result of a studied combination; daily contemporary life with overlapping vestiges from the past coupled with images taken from an archive of family photographs. Embedded within a collection of ornate objects and paraphernalia, the bodies and spaces confront the viewer with hidden meanings behind what is held as precious and their connection to identity. Visual tensions between household objects and occupants describe the subconscious grappling with forms of selective memory, trauma, and cultural amnesia. Varying opacities and interjections create a visual narrative between objects and figures, simultaneously allowing and denying access to the viewer. These constructed spaces become something of an entirely new kind of setting, scenes that narrate a plausible history from his own point of access and internalized memories. These new spaces give as much as they take from the viewer, leaving them in an in-between space of memory and forgetfulness.