I’ve been photographing pretty steadily and exploring being an art photographer for the last 3 years. It had been about 30 years since I showed any kind of art since my 20s in Osaka doing installation art. With this year’s SF Open Studios, I thought it made sense to finally show my printed work and share it in my living room, converted into a gallery for the weekend. I pulled together a two-year project called Nothing with a Name to show 16 color photos mounted on board. This project is an investigation into capturing only things that don’t have obvious names in order to get the essence of seeing itself. Both days saw a good amount of traffic, especially for an art space in someone’s home in Pacific Heights. Surprisingly, a quarter of the photos were purchased by visitors, and I’m happy to know they’ll be hanging on local people’s walls! 

Mounting the photographs was a great experience. My wife, Rika, acted as my art curator, helping me pick photos and order them in a way that we liked. I decided not to frame the photos and instead mounted them on foam board with a quarter-inch separation from the wall. I saw Rinko Kawauchi’s photos mounted this way at the Rose Gallery in LA and was inspired to try it myself. I find it an elegant, modern way to show photography.

Joen Madonna, the executive director of Artspan, who organizes SF Open Studios, kindly stopped by my open studio on Saturday and introduced herself. It was a great chance to tell her how much I appreciate her organization’s amazing work to support artists in San Francisco. She told me that SF Open Studios was started in 1975 and next year they’d be celebrating 50 years of the event by staging art shows around the city all year long! I hope to participate as much as I can, and my wife Rika and I are considering hosting pop-up art photography shows by emerging photographers in our home gallery.

I put together this compilation of art and friends photos to capture the vibe of my first SF Open Studios experience:

Special thanks to y’all!

I want to thank all the super cool and kind people who came out to see my art and talk about art things with me this past weekend! Many of them left their names and emails in my guest book, but I wanted to give a gushing shoutout and thanks to these special individuals for their support in order of their visits: George Goodman, Yiying Lu, Asako Shimazaki, Stephen & Theodore Baloglu, Mayumi Oya, Dave Salem, Charlie Brewer, Gordon Sinclair, Joen Madonna, Michael B. Endicott, Elissa Welsh & her friends, Shinobu & Joe, Gigi & John Obrecht, Linda Ma, Keshab Shrestha (Himal), Daniel & Anna Wagner, and many others who didn’t get their names! I also want to give special thanks for artist advice to Francis Mill, Kirk Jones, Rika Shields, and Geoffrey Farmer. Last, I want to thank Artspan for supporting the art community in SF and keeping SF Open Studios alive all these years.