Maya Fuji (b. 1988, Kanazawa, Japan) is a Japanese-American artist working across painting and traditional Japanese craft, whose practice centers on the liminal experience of being an issei mixed-race woman navigating life between cultures. Her work draws on mythology, folklore, and the subcultures of Showa, Heisei, and the Bay Area to portray nostalgic memories of childhood and the feeling of foreignness in both Japanese and American spaces. Central to her practice is an investigation of the Tsukumogami and Yaoyorozu No Kami — animist and Shinto concepts in which spirits inhabit objects and the world at large — which she reimagines as having immigrated to the US alongside her family, existing within the cultural landscape of the Bay Area in the 1990s and early 2000s. Through this framework, Fuji meditates on the ways ethnically mixed people, immigrants, and children of immigrants keep traditions alive while forging new ways of living. A self-taught artist, Fuji has had solo exhibitions at Charlie James Gallery, Los Angeles, YOD Gallery, Osaka, and SWIM Gallery, San Francisco, and her work is held in the permanent collection of the Crocker Art Museum. She is represented by Charlie James Gallery, Los Angeles.