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Nakashima, who was born to a Japanese-American father and an Irish-Canadian mother, draws on sources from both traditional Japanese art and modern European masters.
As Nakashima grew up during World War II, America was confining his extended family members and countrymen to internment camps. His knowledge of this occurrence is a major theme of his allegorical work. For example, he often uses a gilded cage to symbolize their internment, and salmon as the everyman, swimming upstream to realize his destiny.
Nakashima’s work is in the holdings of numerous museums across the United States and in Japan, including the National Museum of American Art, the Corcoran Museum, and the Long Beach Museum of Art.