Kaz Oshiro

Kaz Oshiro (b. 1967, Okinawa, Japan) lives and works in Los Angeles. Oshiro makes detailed painted recreations of commonplace objects, such as amplifiers, kitchen cabinets, and suitcases, that go beyond the symbolic to create the illusion of function. Peeled stickers, squashed flies, scuffs, and scratches are all painted, so that an object appears worn by use though every mark is the product of painstaking labor. In Kyoko's Room, his 2026 exhibition at Make Room, Los Angeles, he arranged these objects into a room based on Eiko Ishioka's set designs for Paul Schrader's film on the life of Yukio Mishima, staging a painting that can be traversed as if it were a room.

Oshiro received Bachelor and Master of Fine Arts degrees from California State University, Los Angeles. One-person exhibitions of his work have been presented at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art's Charles White Elementary School Gallery, Los Angeles (2013); Tokyo Institute of Technology, Tokyo (2007); Las Vegas Art Museum, Las Vegas (2007); and Pomona College Museum of Art, Claremont, CA (2005).

His work has been included in thematic exhibitions including Space Between, The FLAG Art Foundation, New York (2015); Visual Deception II: Into the Future, Bunkamura: The Museum, Tokyo (2014); Between Critique and Absorption: Contemporary Art and Consumer Culture, Haggerty Museum of Art, Marquette University, Milwaukee (2013); Simulacrum, Columbus College of Art and Design, Columbus, OH (2012); Bruce Conner and the Primal Scene of Punk Rock, Museum of Contemporary Art Denver (2012); Lifelike, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (2012); New Image Sculpture, McNay Art Museum, San Antonio (2011); Artist's Museum, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2010); Less is less, more is more, that's all, CAPC Musée d'art contemporain, Bordeaux, France (2008); One Way or Another: Asian American Art Now, Berkeley Art Museum, Berkeley, CA (2007); Thing: New Sculpture from Los Angeles, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2005); Nothing Compared to This, Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati (2004); and the California Biennial, Orange County Museum of Art, Newport Beach, CA (2004).