The artist who goes only by the mononym Naoshi is a master at spinning tiny grains of sand into something grand.
She specializes in sunae, the Japanese art of making images out of colored sand. In her tidy Alhambra home studio, she meticulously assembles out-of-this-world tableaux in saturated, punchy hues.
Naoshi’s pieces usually center around a chic ingenue sporting food-focused fashion — think bonnets made of bonbons and boba tea skirts. One of her earliest characters, Ice Cream Girl, is a go-getter with a scoop for a head, inspired by a character she drew as a child. Another of her stars is a fierce fast-food warrior clad in a cheeseburger skirt, wielding ketchup and mustard laser guns and flanked by a squad of fighters who happen to be anthropomorphic pizza and hot dogs.
But not all of the artist’s works have a gourmet bent — she also creates celestial goddesses and nature-inspired divas, and made a series devoted to the Major Arcana of tarot. Her “It” girls often keep company with a coterie of tiny monkeys, kittens or creatures with confections for heads. Their vibrant, jam-packed settings depict anything from an oceanic rave to a rainbow-hued big top performance to a joyride through the cosmos. And no matter the motif, she always makes sure her subjects are “playful, sweet and dreamy.”
“When I was a child, I had the experience of making sunae using a kit,” she recalled during a recent interview. “That memory stayed with me very strongly.”
Harnessing that nostalgia, she started creating and selling small DIY sunae kits of her own design in 2004.
“I began making [them] with the hope that they could become a fun and memorable experience for someone else as well,” she said of the kits, which range from easy to challenging, accommodating budding artists of any age and skill set.
But whipping up one of her full-scale smorgasbords of sprinkled donuts, popcorn and nigiri for a gallery display isn’t mere child’s play. The technique involves attaching an original sketch to an adhesive backing, cutting it out, strategically sprinkling sand on the desired areas, then removing any misplaced grains one by one. Each piece takes her anywhere from a few days to a few weeks.
Originally from Japan (Yokohama by way of Iwate), Naoshi first visited Southern California in 2010, when she participated in a Sanrio anniversary exhibition in Santa Monica. There, she displayed her work and held a sand art workshop.
“It was such a really inspiring experience, I began to feel that I wanted to challenge myself as an artist in Los Angeles,” she said. “It’s always so sunny and the food is so good! In Japan, a lot of people wear black and white, but in L.A. everything’s so colorful. I get inspiration all the time.”
Since taking the leap to living in the L.A. area in 2014, she has exhibited her work at Gallery Nucleus, Corey Helford Gallery and La Luz de Jesus Gallery, to name a few. She has also conducted workshops and sold merchandise — from art prints to T-shirts to washi tape — at such spots as Leanna Lin’s Wonderland, Popkiller and Pygmy Hippo Shoppe.
Establishing herself in a new country was not without its challenges. “The culture is totally different,” she explained. “I felt stress every day.”
Early obstacles included overcoming the language barrier, as well as learning how to navigate the city’s vastness, how to open a bank account, and where to find markets and restaurants where she could buy her favorite Japanese delicacies.
“I eventually started to enjoy the act of challenging myself,” she said of her transition phase. These days, she high-fives herself for successfully filing business taxes on her own and she has become a regular at Katsu-Jin, a Tonkatsu spot in South Pasadena.
Last year, Naoshi released “The ABC of Sunae,” a mini-encyclopedia of sorts that traces the global origins of sand art in its various forms, including the ceremonial sand paintings of the Navajo in the American Southwest and the spiritual sand mandalas of Tibetan Buddhists. She also takes readers behind the scenes of her approach to the craft, showing off her preferred tools and providing step-by-step photos of the process.
“The biggest challenge of working with sand is that there’s no room for mistakes,” she said while sitting at a worktable stocked with dozens of small sand-filled glass jars, all arranged by color. “Once the sand sticks, it’s almost impossible to make corrections. So if there’s even a small part I’m not satisfied with, I have to start over from the very first step.”
A stark white workspace filled with natural light, her trusty craft knife, a steady hand and a keen pair of eyes are all essential for keeping her girls’ cheeks rosy and for making their backdrops sparkle. And she maintains sanity by working to a soundtrack of her favorite Japanese pop songs and the bouncing beats of Basement Jaxx.
“Sand may be the opposite of an efficient or convenient material,” she said, “but its soft texture and the time I spend deeply focusing on the process feels almost meditative to me.”
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