BIOGRAPHY
Faith-Ann Kiwa Young is a Los Angeles–based, half-Japanese multidisciplinary artist working across photography, textiles, and installation. Drawing from both California perceptual traditions and Japanese aesthetics, her practice explores memory, presence, and human connection through layered photographic works and immersive textile environments.
Blending photography, painting, digital collage, and hand-constructed textiles, Young creates site-responsive works that often incorporate community participation and collective reflection. Her projects frequently engage themes of healing, nonviolence, cultural memory, and human connection through collaborations with cultural institutions, nonprofits, and community organizations.
Her work has been exhibited internationally, from Miami to England, and presented at institutions and sites including SoFi Stadium, Descanso Gardens’ Sturt Haaga Gallery, and the Japanese American Cultural & Community Center (JACCC). She is the creator of Kibō Nobori (“hope flags”), an ongoing installation series inspired by Japanese koinobori traditions, with multi-site installations presented across Little Tokyo in Los Angeles. In 2026, she received a Roots & Resilience Artist Grant from the Doan Foundation and served as Artist in Residence with the City of Santa Monica.
Young earned her B.A. from Barnard College, Columbia University, studied photography at UCLA, and Japanese language at Kanda University in Chiba, Japan. Her photographic work has appeared in The Economist, Rolling Stone, and Dwell, and has been published in two books.
Through her multidisciplinary practice, Young continues to develop installations and photographic works that create spaces for reflection, gathering, and shared experience, using color, translucency, and movement to explore how art can hold memory while remaining open to the present.
ARTIST STATEMENT
I create suspended installations of color, light, and textile form - hybrid works that combine photography, paint, and fabric, shifting with air and movement. Printed onto translucent fabrics and sewn into large-scale installations, the pieces transform space into environments of stillness, inviting viewers to pause and experience a quieter, more reflective atmosphere.
As a half-Japanese artist living on the coast of Los Angeles, my practice is shaped by California’s expansiveness as well as by traditions passed down through my family. My mother Ann and my grandmother Faith Akiko shared with me ways of seeing rooted in ritual, harmony, and attentiveness to the spirit world. Fragments of my grandmother’s scarves and kimono textiles have carried into my work, small inheritances that continue to guide my relationship to material and memory.
Many works begin with a photograph of a landscape, person, or place. I digitally paint, cut, and layer imagery with hand-painted and printed fabrics until the composition loosens into something more elemental. Suspended in space, the work shifts with air and light, revealing itself slowly as conditions change. In some installations, viewers are invited to contribute wishes or written gestures, allowing the piece to evolve through collective participation.
My Japanese name, Kiwa, refers to a threshold- the space between inside and outside, between one state and another. This idea guides my practice. I create environments that hold the in-between, where memory, presence, and atmosphere meet, and where the boundary between the visible and the unseen feels momentarily open.