Mauka to Makai

The project.

In Mauka to Makai, Shingo Yamazaki navigates the shifting terrain of identity, memory, and place through paintings that dissolve the boundaries between interior and exterior, personal and collective, past and present. The exhibition’s title draws from Hawaiian directional language: mauka meaning “toward the mountains” and makai meaning “toward the ocean.” This reference is rooted in local ways of orienting oneself within the land, while also serving as a metaphor for the artist’s own movement across cultural and psychological geographies. Yamazaki’s compositions intertwine domestic architecture and natural formations. Hallways become ridgelines, rock outcrops echo window sills, and thresholds open into liminal dreamscapes. These spaces serve not as literal representations but as portals, sites of in-betweenness where inherited histories and lived experiences converge. Figures based on family and close companions are rendered in quiet, contemplative postures, often partially obscured or ethereal in form, caught between visibility and absence. Layer by layer, Yamazaki builds his surfaces with transparent glazes that function as both memory and metaphor: fractured, elusive, and incomplete. These veils conceal and reveal, mirroring the nature of recollection and the selective clarity of personal narrative. What is glimpsed through these passages is not a singular truth, but a composite of many, subject to erosion, revision, and reinterpretation. Born in Honolulu and now based in Los Angeles, Yamazaki reflects on what it means to move between places, cultures, and generations. In Mauka to Makai, home is not fixed but continuously reimagined, shaped as much by longing and fragmentation as by continuity. The result is a body of work that does not seek resolution but dwells in the generative ambiguity of becoming, where multiple versions of self and place can coexist.

Founded in 2020 by Rom Levy, Volery Gallery promotes artists whose art is best described as the New Contemporary Wave. Established in Dubai, the hub of business in the Middle East and Africa, the gallery features the most prominent international artists.