Lost in the Night

Born and raised in Brazil to Japanese parents, Oscar Oiwa Saito, later lived in Tokyo, briefly in London, and now is based in New York, and his peripatetic life is perfectly distilled in the globalized fantasia of his paintings. Executed in rich, intricate detail, the works are evocative of night markets full of exotic food vendors, glowing as if with their own internal light. Oiwa often adds additional surrealistic details or jarringly out-of-scale elements, giving his works both an humanistic warmth but a cautiously ambivalent tone over globalization and its disparate effects.