Nami Oshiro is an artist based in the Washington DC-Metro area. She makes drawings, paintings, and comics. Her work plays with absurdities experienced by people with unique relationships with societal constructs like race and gender. Viewers have described her art as "trippy," "unsettling," "nihilistic," and "very upsetting to my friend Daniel."
She was born to Okinawan parents in California, was raised in Florida and Virginia, and now works in northern Virginia. She went to the Corcoran College of Art + Design, where she received a Bachelor of Fine Art in Fine Art in 2012.
Oshiro recently began exhibiting work throughout the East Coast again after a decade-long hiatus from the arts community.
Artist Statement:
My art depicts surrealist scenes of characters with unique experiences related to identity, be it from race, gender, or neurodiversity. Growing up in a doomsday cult - in which I prayed every day for Armageddon to wipe out the world’s evils - gave me a lot of cognitive dissonance, which developed into an overblown sense of the absurdity of everyday life and its resulting neuroses. Everything I draw and how I draw it is informed by this absurdity.
My style is influenced by my Okinawan-Japanese background, especially by movements like ukiyo-e or shin hanga, featuring flat colors, stilted perspectives, and glorification of the human body. When I work in color, I try to infuse a sense of Okinawan flavor through bright, garish palettes like one might see in bingata textiles, which capture the indigenous Okinawan spirit of brashness.
I’m also inspired by 19th and early 20th-century illustrators like Edmund Dulac and Aubrey Beardsley. The Golden Age of Illustration and shin hanga, both estuaries of eastern and western influences, are movements that resonate with my identity as part of the Okinawan-American diaspora.
All my work is hand-drawn, even pieces colored digitally, which helps me feel connected to what I make.
