FEATURED ARTISTS
Satoru Abe
Satoru Abe, one of Hawaii’s living legends, continues to work and create art at 93 years of age. Born in Moʻiliʻili, Hawaii, Abe attended McKinley High School where he took art classes. After graduating, he attended the California School for Fine Arts and then left for New York in 1948 where he attended the Art Students League of New York. Although he began as a painter, Abe is well-known for his many large copper sculptures. He is a founder of the Metcalf Chateau with six other local Asian artists from Hawaii, Bumpei Akaji, Edmund Chung, Tetsuo Ochikubo, Jerry T. Okimoto, James Park, and Tadashi Sato.
In 1956, Abe was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in New York. He returned to Hawaii in 1970, and received a National Endowment for the Arts Artist in Resident grant that same year.
(Roy’s Hawaii Kai, Roy’s Waikiki)
Harry Tsuchidana
Harry Tsuchidana is well known as one of the generation of Japanese-American artists who emerged in Hawaii in the 1950s, along with Tadashi Sato, Satoru Abe, Toshiko Takaezu, Tetsuo Ochikubo, Bumpei Akaji, Jerry Okimoto, Harue Oyama McVay, Keiichi Kimura, and Sueko Kimura. Born in 1932 in Waipahu, Oahu, Tsuchidana took classes at the Honolulu Academy of Arts school as a teenager. After serving in the U.S. Marine Corps from 1952 to 1955, he studied art at the Corcoran School of Art (1955-56), and then moved to New York City and enrolled at the Brooklyn Museum School of Art and the Pratt Contemporary Graphics Art Center (1957-59). In 1959, he received the prestigious John Hay Whitney Fellowship and has become one of Hawaii’s most beloved local master artists.
(Roy’s Hawaii Kai)
Yvonne Cheng
Born in Surabaya, Indonesia, Yvonne Cheng was educated in Dutch schools and privately tutored in art. In 1967, she moved to Honolulu where she enrolled in a batik class at the Bishop Museum. From 1970 through the early 1980s, Cheng used batik as her primary medium. Her compositions are a melding of memories, influences and experiences. Her figures are often large scale and of Polynesian women. She did extensive research on Hawaiian and Tahitian textile design with her figures sometimes wearing colorful traditional Hawaiian kapa or Tahitian pareos. Cheng treats her art as a job, clocking into the cottage studio next to her Makiki house at midmorning and working until five every day. Over the decades, she’s moved through a different mediums, batik, abstract paper collages and acrylics.
(Roy’s Hawaii Kai)
John Koga
John Koga was born in 1964 in Honolulu, earned an MFA in ceramics and sculpture from the University of Hawaii, and traveled to Italy to study sculpture at a foundry in Pietra Santa. From his mentors, Saturo Abe and Tadashi Sato, Koga learned abstract expressionist painting techniques and absorbed the modernist aesthetic that defines his work. Koga is known for his abstract and semi-abstract sculptures and paintings inspired by the ocean and mountains of his native Hawaii. He has received multiple awards from the Honolulu Museum of Art and the Hawaii State Foundation on Culture and the Arts. His works of art are part of museum, corporate, public, and private collections and have been exhibited in cities including Honolulu, Los Angeles, Chicago, New York, Miami, Tokyo, and Shanghai. He has over 30 years’ experience in art installation at museums, galleries, corporate offices, and private residences. As an active participant in promoting the arts in Honolulu, Koga serves on board of the Honolulu Symphony Orchestra and has emerged as a leader in promoting and supporting local art and other artists in Hawaii.
(Roy’s Hawaii, Roy’s Waikiki and Goen Dining + Bar)
Solomon Enos
Solomon Robert Nui Enos is a Native Hawaiian artist, educator, and visionary. Born and raised in Makaha, Oahu, Enos has been creating art for more than 30 years. His recent work reveals an extraordinary talent, adept at artistic expression in a wide variety of media including oil paintings, book illustrations, outdoor murals (both painted and in glass mosaic), and mixed-media sculptures. Enos’ work touches on themes of ancestry and identity, the human relationship with the earth, and the future of Hawai‘i, its people, and its resources. He has exhibited in Culture Labs (Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center), Biennial X (Honolulu Museum of Art), 6th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art (Queensland Art Gallery), CONTACT art exhibitions, and others.
(Goen Dining + Bar)
Naoki Hayashi
About 100 years ago in Japan, fishermen created gyotaku prints to record their prized catches. Gyotaku is created by pressing rice paper onto a fish covered with ink or paint.
Artist Naoki Hayashi began making gyotaku prints at age 11. Since then he has refined and mastered his unique gyotaku process. Each of Naoki's gyotaku pieces is created using non-toxic acrylic paints and Japanese shoji paper. As an avid diver and fisher, Naoki views each gyotaku as a window into the underwater world he sees when diving in Hawaii's beautiful ocean waters. His art features fish in true life color and in compositions that reflect how they are found in nature. Naoki has a deep respect for the ocean and its creatures. Thus, he will only create gyotaku art from fish that will be eaten. Each of his gyotaku pieces is both a record of a fish and a meal shared with friends and family.
Eric Robison
Eric Robison was hired as a concept show designer at Walt Disney Imagineering and stayed with the Walt Disney Company for 19 years. He is recognized as one of the best-selling artists in the Disney Group’s galleries and shops worldwide and most recently is part of the exhibit, Mickey Mouse: From Walt to the World at The Walt Disney Family Museum in San Francisco. He has been a consultant for MCA Universal Studios, Warner Bros., the Olympics and the entertainment & film industry. In 2006 he joined Crazy Shirts in Hawaii as the Creative Director.
Scottie Flamm
Former Hawaii resident Scottie Flamm was born in Sacramento, California. At the age of sixteen she moved to Hawaii and lived here for 35 years. While living in Hawaii she had the good fortune to co-own Atelier 4 Gallery, and Bethel Street Gallery for almost a decade. After leaving Hawaii she lived in Austin, and Miami before making Oceanside, California her home. An avid traveler Scottie has traveled to 55 countries, and has found much of her inspiration for her work through her experiences on her travels. Her work can be found in private and corporate collections worldwide.