Brent Nakamoto is a Queer, Japanese-American, and Buddhist artist with a background in painting and drawing, printmaking, photography, and book arts. He currently lives and works in Pittsburgh, PA. He is a Visiting Lecturer in the University of Pittsburgh School of Art, and the Program and Marketing Coordinator for Brew House Arts, where he manages the Distillery Emerging Artist Residency. He has shown work nationally and internationally, including in California, Saint Louis, New York, Pittsburgh, and Kolkata, India. His work is included in the University of Maryland Art Gallery permanent collection. In 2022, he curated “Plain Silk, Uncarved Wood,” an exhibition of eight Asian-American artists living in Pittsburgh, and his critique of the 58th Carnegie International was published by Bunker Review in April 2023.

My creative process is influenced by the study and practice of Zen Buddhism. Throughout my work I approach art-making as a daily, repetitive practice, and a method of intimately engaging with the world. In doing so, I’m interested in creating opportunities for meditative observation and contemplation, inviting viewers to a closer examination of images and their relationship to them. In my paintings, I am often trying to create spaces that are quiet, empty, and still. Using repetitive gestures in painting and performative works, I invite the audience to consider creative practice as an unending and cyclical process. Many of my works explore doubling, or tautology, inspired by the Zen tradition of playing with words and images to reveal the meaning and meaninglessness of language. I often draw on images and text from Zen Buddhism, particularly the work of Dōgen, and the emptiness teachings of Mayahana Buddhism.