Chikai Ohazama

Chikai Ohazama is a biomedical engineer, an artist, filmmaker and musician, whose career path has taken many unusual turns.

He was raised in Tallahassee, Florida, graduated from Vanderbilt University in 1994 and went on to receive a PhD in Biomedical Engineering at Duke University in 1998, focusing his research on the visualization and analysis of 3-D cardiac ultrasound technology. Ohazama thought that  he would probably wind up teaching at a university, although he had recorded a few music albums and produced  the music for two productions for his university’s theater department.

He was co-creator of Keyhole, a company that was acquired by Google and became Google Earth. He worked at Google for more than ten years as co-creator of Google Maps. He left Google to start his own company, but it did not do well. The failure, serendipitously, led Ohazama into great success. 

He has always been an art lover, especially of the works of Van Gogh and had posters of Van Gogh's paintings on his dorm room walls. While Ohazama was desparing about the lack of success of his own company he worked with Web3 and began to become increasingly interested in the world of NFTs. “I have been drawn to the art itself, especially the digitally native artists, some of whom worked in the special effects and gaming industries and are now using those same skills to create their own art.” he said. “But there is also digital art that is purely of the form like voxel art, which I truly love and find mesmerizing.” He also found a community of artists and art lovers with whom he connected.

Ohazama created Monolith Gallery, where artists from all over the world send their works for display. 

For his own work, both still and cinematic, Ohazama juxtaposes two concepts that wouldn’t normally go together and “in that dissonance discovering and pulling out a through line that reveals something about the human experience or at least makes us contemplate it.”

The works of Chikai Ohazama have been on exhibit at Alisan Fine Arts in New York, in Times Square and in galleries in Turkey, Dubai and Mexico.

Chikai Ohazama lives and works in San Francisco.