Long conversations about art, memory, and becoming.
Artist Decoded by Yoshino follows long, reflective conversations with filmmakers, painters, musicians, and creative friends. The show favors origin stories, emotional honesty, and slow questions about how art forms a person over time.
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Artist Decoded by Yoshino is a warm, long-form interview show centered on artists and the inner conditions that shape their work. It is not hurried. Episodes often open with a new film, exhibition, book, video, or project, but the real subject is usually the path that led there. Yoshino asks about origin stories, formative teachers, friendships, relationships, family imprint, place, taste, and the uneasy discipline of staying close to a calling. The conversations are personal without feeling staged. Recent episodes show the range clearly. Mark Wolynn brings inherited family trauma, somatic healing, epigenetics, and the idea of art as a healing process into view. Aisha Schliessler talks through filmmaking as collaboration, the joy of making work with other people, and the strange grief that can follow the end of an intense project. Æmen Ededéen speaks from a world of painting, New Mexico, abandoned spaces, Aletheia House, relationships, accountability, and the difficult task of seeing what one would rather avoid. Manuel Mathieu’s episode frames painting, ceramics, installation, historical violence, erasure, spiritual legacy, and abstraction as a search for meaning. Daniel Segrove’s return draws on friendship, San Francisco, No Wave, and the long passage of an artist’s life. Ray Barbee expands the show’s sense of creativity through skateboarding, guitar, photography, San Jose memory, and curiosity as a way of moving through the world. Yulia Bas brings fine art, architecture, yacht design, relocation, vulnerability, death, the muse, and the daily choice to move toward life rather than away from it. Saman Kesh gives the show one of its sharper industry portraits, tracing commercials, music videos, Ed Sheeran’s “Azizam,” creative pressure, production chaos, and the emotional cost of making ambitious work. Across these episodes, the show returns to process. It values the half-formed answer. It lets guests speak at length, circle back, and discover what they mean in real time. The tone can be tender, grave, funny, or intense, but it rarely feels manufactured. Its appeal comes from the space it gives artists to connect craft with memory, identity, fear, devotion, and change. For listeners who want art conversation with human weight, Artist Decoded by Yoshino offers the slow pleasure of watching a thought find its shape.
Made for: For listeners drawn to artist interviews that favor process, vulnerability, and lived experience over quick career highlights. It especially suits painters, filmmakers, musicians, skaters, and creative people thinking through their own path.
What sets it apart: The show’s strength is its patience: Yoshino lets guests build meaning through memory, friendship, contradiction, and reflection. It feels closer to a trusted studio conversation than a media appearance.
"I started this series as a means for exploration, an exploration of self, and an exploration of the perspectives of other artists. This series is an unabridged documentation of conversations between artists. It's a series dedicated to breaking down the barriers we tend to set up in our own minds. I want to inspire future creatives to have the courage to explore and experiment. This is about making dreams a reality and not about letting our dreams fall to the wayside. My intention is to give my audience a sense of real human connection, something that feels rich and organic. When I was thinking of a title I thought of the word "movement". In relation to the Renaissance period in art, my goal…
Based on 6 episodes we listened to · September 2026
Yoshino connects filmmaking craft to the personal choices, collaborations, and creative risks that shape work before it reaches the screen.
Artist Decoded by Yoshino turns creator interviews into close studies of how artistic lives and screen work take shape. Yoshino asks filmmakers about decisions beneath the finished image: Riley Stearns discusses writing and trusting an audience, Saman Kesh recounts production…
Yoshino gets from yacht design to the life you're choosing one daily decision at a time.
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Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
Yoshino and Mark talk about vulnerability, comparison, and learning to trust a practice of your own.
Yoshino begins with art and vulnerability, then he and Mark move into the less tidy business of trusting your own direction. Physique goals make the idea concrete: comparison can pull attention toward an ideal result and away from the work done each day.
A filmmaker recalls the pleasure of working together and the loss she feels when a project ends.
Charlie Langton has spent the past 20 years sculpting horses. Aisha Schlesler's film about him gives Yoshino and his guest a place to begin, but their conversation soon turns to the people who help make a film.
A reflective art conversation about abandoned spaces, Aletheia House, and the intimacy of being seen clearly.
This PlayNext episode follows artist and painter Eamon Ededean, also known as Joshua Hagler, through the abandoned spaces that have shaped both his work and his self-understanding.
Ray Barbee links skateboarding, guitar, and photography through a life shaped by curiosity.
Ray Barbee comes across as a restless but grounded creative, moving between skateboarding, guitar, and photography without treating any one lane as the whole story.
A painter's career path becomes a reflective conversation about art, mortality, and the choices that shape a life.
Yoshino's conversation with Yulia Bas traces an artist's path through fine-art study, architecture, yacht design, and relocations from Italy to Spain.
A candid look at the chaos, pressure, and instinct behind Ed Sheeran's "Azizam" video.
Artists Decoded follows filmmaker and director Saman Keshe through the making of Ed Sheeran's "Azizam" video, using the production's mix of planning and disorder as its strongest thread.
Riley Stearns breaks down the craft and perspective behind a film designed to leave viewers room to meet it on their own terms.
Riley Stearns returns to Artist Decoded for a focused conversation about Duel, built around a terminal diagnosis, cloning, a failed decommissioning, and a court-mandated fight to the death.
Yoshino and Mark talk about art, body image, teachers, and learning to trust one's own response.
Yoshino opens her return conversation with Mark by asking about art as a healing practice. She describes vulnerability as something artists look for and bring into their work. From there, they talk about idealized bodies and how comparison can make it harder to enjoy a practice.
Anna Martin interviews writers and couples about the real stories behind Modern Love essays.
Knox and Jamie turn celebrity gossip, film deep dives, and streaming news into weekly comedy.
Two hosts revisit one film, show, or book a week, plus long personal tangents.
A Brazilian journalist spends years reinvestigating unsolved child disappearances in Paraná.
Cris Bartz and Juva Lauer alternate debate and interview episodes on Brazilian social issues.
Robert Wright interviews specialists on Iran, Gaza, Ukraine, Taiwan, and open-source AI.
Yoshino hosts Mark Wolynn, a leading expert on inherited family trauma, for a deep conversation on healing as an art form.
Artist Joshua Hagler discusses his non-analytical approach to painting and the interplay of meaning and non-meaning in art.
Aja Daashuur discusses how everyone has intuition and psychic abilities, and how to cultivate them by surrendering to inner pulls.
Host Yoshino interviews author Natalie Goldberg about her writing journey, her book 'Writing Down the Bones', and her latest work on haiku.
Host Joe Shino and filmmaker Saman Keshe interview writer-director Riley Stearns about his new film 'Dual', which premiered at Sundance.
Mark Wolynn says a diagnosis of central serous retinopathy led him to leave his job, relationship, and city and travel as far as Indonesia for answers.
Yoshino speaks with director and filmmaker Aisha Schlesler about her film on Charlie Langton, a sculptor who has spent 20 years making horses and who works out of a converted tractor barn.
Yoshino speaks with artist and painter Eamon Ededean, also known as Joshua Hagler, about the newly launched book Nijo from Unicorn and Nicodeme and the four-year New Mexico project behind it.
An interview with multidisciplinary artist Manuel Mathieu about his exhibition 'Bury Your Masters' and his exploration of historical violence, erasure, and spiritual legacy through painting, ceramics, and installation.
Yoshino introduces a conversation with artist Daniel Segrove, reflecting on their long friendship and his growth since his last appearance on the podcast.
Artist Decoded host Joe Yoshino interviews Ray Barbee, 2020 Skateboarding Hall of Fame inductee, guitarist, and photographer, tracing how skateboarding opened a world of creative disciplines for both men who grew up in the same San Jose neighborhood.
Yoshino interviews Yulia Bas, a Moscow-born fine artist and painter based in Barcelona, who traces her creative path from a vivid four-year-old epiphany at a local art school through a decade-long detour into architecture and yacht design, and her return to painting in Barcelona in 2017 after a turbulent relocation from Russia through Italy to Spain.
Artist Decoded by Yoshino features Yoshino and filmmaker-director Saman Kesh, whose credits include commercials for Zoom, Google, Uber, Toyota, and Nintendo, plus videos for Basement Jaxx, Kygo, Calvin Harris, Placebo, and Ed Sheeran.
Yoshino is interviewed by his former assistant Noah Wainwright for a personal episode recorded in Brazil.
Actor Raymond Lee discusses the importance of honesty and presence when taking on new roles, especially as an Asian American in the industry.