One thing that makes the paintings of Shizu Saldamando so refreshing, and important, is how they capture the power, individuality, and humanity of the hybrid Latinx and Asian people in the art and punk scenes of Los Angeles and the southwestern United States.

By avoiding caricature and stereotype, Saldamando's vibrant, original portraits celebrate and elevate her subjects by keeping it real. 

“I try to portray people as strong, resilient, fluid, and flawed,” she says. “The idea that we constantly have to prove our humanity to be treated as a human is something that I am not invested in. I am not interested in the idea of exceptionalism either. I’m more preoccupied with the personal exploration of my own life and the people I admire who inhabit it.”

Saldamando’s portraits incorporate painting and drawing on canvas, wood, paper, and cloth. She excels in harnessing aspects of Pop, Minimalism, street art, and figurative Chicano art to create original portraits that are at once current and timeless. 

Of her process, Saldamando says: “I work off snapshots I take from my phone. So I spend a lot of time going through photos, trying to figure out what might work as a painting or drawing. I pay attention to the patterns, clothes, hair, etc., of the person and try to visualize if it might look more interesting in paint or pencil, or pen … There is a certain level of ‘kitsch’ I try to maintain that just appeals to my own aesthetic.”

The effect is one of familiarity. Her subjects are people many of us have seen in the bookstores, cafes, and clubs of Los Angeles, Phoenix, Houston, or San Francisco. The result is an impressive gallery of artfully captured, racially ambiguous everyday Gen-X and Millenial punks, of regular people wearing band shirts and black leather jackets, sporting tattoos, piercings, and blue, green, or pink hair.

These are Saldamando's people, and her love and respect for them are clear. It is that love and respect, along with her refined but seemingly casual technique that sets her work apart.

In fine art, ethnic minorities are often portrayed in ways that reinforce cultural caricatures or outside notions of identity that distort their own stories. The Mexican-American becomes pachuco, the cholo, the low-rider, the gang-banger. Individuals, male and female, become exoticized or fetishized as objects that often mean more to the perceiver, the outsider than they do to those being portrayed.

As a mixed-race, Asian-Latinx woman who identifies with both aspects of her heritage, it is a reality Saldamando knows well and strives to avoid. 

"When I started doing portraits in art school I was hyper-conscious of the problems of exoticism for being an Asian woman," she told the L.A. Times. "I'm not trying to do some Larry Clark 'look at these kids' things."

Born in San Francisco to a Chicano father and a Japanese American mother, she grew up in the heavily Latinx Mission District, where her parents still live. 

As a kid, she spent hours drawing, developing skills with colored pencils and ballpoint pens, often imitating Chicano and Latino themes and styles of the time.

By high school, she was making money drawing portraits of friends. After graduating from UCLA, she earned her master of fine art at CalArts in 2005. 

Throughout her journey and education, she continued to develop as an artist, but it was her immersion into the Latinx underground music scene that fueled her early work. 

Her habit of photographing friends from the scene, then rendering the photos into portraits using paint and ink and colored pencil on un-primed materials, coupled with her use of Cholo and Chicano symbols, Aztec images, and prison and street art helped her work stand out. She got invited to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art's 2008 exhibition"Ghost Sightings: Art After the Chicano Movement." 

Since then, Saldamando continues to paint the people she knows. And though her circle may be a bit smaller these days, with a 3-year-old son to raise, the 42-year-old artist still produces compelling work and is a part of the artistic conversation.

By highlighting the dignity and individuality of her people on their own terms, she captures their humanness. The result is work that is ordinary yet sublime, individual yet universal.

When the question of politics comes up, Saldamando points out that there is more to the mixed-race experience than the stories and struggles of immigrants. In many ways, for Saldamando, painting people in her own style is a political act. 

“I gravitate to people who construct themselves as high art,” she says. “They put themselves together in a style that they have honed out of economic necessity or cultural things. It’s people who are like art already. … The Latinx experience is more than trauma." 

Saldamando is just one of many Latinx artists working in L.A. to tell their own stories about the people who make up their world. It’s only “recently that I have really felt connected and a part of a community of artists who I feel share a direct dialogue and kinship with,” she says. 

“I’ve been dialoguing and vibing with the work of and with Gabriella Sanchez, Gabriella Ruiz, Lupe Rosales, Rafa Esparza, Michael Alvarez, Sebastian Hernandez, Sandy Rodriguez, Patrick Martinez, Jaime Munoz, Maria Maea, Nani Chacon, Ricardo Estrada, Ernesto Yerena,” she says. All have been featured in her portraits.

For Saldamando, these and other artists represent an important voice at a crucial time in our cultural and political history. Saldamando is emphatic that the art world’s embrace of ethnic and mixed-race voices is necessary, at the very least, to legitimize their claim to authentically represent the communities they serve.

“There has always been such a strong community of Latinx/Chican@ artists creating work throughout history and I feel that now during this moment in history, and being in the Southwest, institutions are realizing they can’t ignore us and claim they accurately represent the cities they inhabit. People are being called to task and forced to reckon the institutionalized racism that they continually perpetrate,” she says.

Asked about the importance of the fusion of identities, cultures, and experiences that make up her world and her art, Saldamando points to some key parts of our American historical and cultural reality.

“If anything, as inhabitants of this country, everyone is influenced by so many different cultures, and this country as a whole is most influenced by Black popular culture since its inception,” she says.

“The fusion is from Native people, African slaves, Chinese railroad workers, Filipino agricultural workers, Mexicans who have been in the Southwest since it was Mexico. It’s incredibly important we realize how we are all influenced by this fusion and have been since we’ve been in this country and that white people are not the sole creators of ‘American culture’ by a long shot.”

Saldamando's artwork has been featured at the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery, Washington, D.C.; Museo del Barrio, New York City; Setagaya Museum, Tokyo; Indianapolis Museum of Contemporary Art, Indianapolis; Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego; Japanese American National Museum, Los Angeles; CAM Contemporaneo, Guadalajara; and the Chinese American Museum, Los Angeles. She is a recipient of the California Community Foundation Fellowship for Emerging Visual Artists. 

Saldamando served as 2019-20 Wanlass Artist in Residence at Oxy Arts in Los Angeles. 

Her work is currently on display at the Self-Help Graphics Dia De Los Muertos show, and The Smithsonian Chicano Print show. She will be showing some video work virtually through the Epoch Virtual Gallery organized by Peter Wu.

In 2022, Saldamando’s work will be featured together with work by painter Esther Hernandez, as part of a two-woman show at the National Museum of Mexican Art in Chicago.

Find out more about the art of Shizu Saldamando, or purchase her work, at the Charlie James Gallery. 

View a gallery of Shizu Saldamando’s artworks. 

View more art by Shizu Saldamando at Eastsiderla.com.