Artist and curator Hideo Sakata, a force in the Los Angeles arts community, dies at 87

Hideo Sakata, the Nagasaki-born, Los Angeles-based artist and curator, died July 30 after a lengthy battle with cancer. In his own words: “Peace is at the essence of everything I do.” Sakata arrived in Los Angeles in 1970 from Mexico, where he first intended to live and work after leaving Japan in 1967. These meetings eventually lead to Sakata’s founding of Lantern of the East Los Angeles in the late 1980s, with artists Lee Kye Song, P. Khemraj and Yoko Kamijyo, who saw Eastern aesthetic sensibilities as an important counterforce to the Western-dominated tendencies of contemporary art. He described the vast spaces surrounding the orb and bands as “regions of metaphysical portent … the realm of gross human experience, and that infernal concussion only a single event.” Sakata was included in the 2022 exhibition “Abstract Los Angeles: Four Generations” at the Brand Library and Art Center, alongside Peter Alexander, Billy Al Bengston, Ed Moses, Andy Moses and Margaret Nielsen, among others. Sakata’s exhibition history is peppered with titles such as “West Meets East,” “Multi-Cultural Exhibit of Los Angeles” and “Exhibition of Asian Pacific American Artists.” Though he lived for more than half a century in Los Angeles, his institutional exhibits — as an artist or curator — largely took place in Asia.