[citation needed] Nakadate's 2005 solo show at Danziger Projects, "Love Hotel and Other Stories", was featured in The New York Times,[4] The Village Voice,[5] and Flash Art.

[8] Laurel Nakadate is known for creating video and photographic works that explore themes of sexuality, femininity and gender roles, and the knife-edge between vulnerability and power within chance encounters.

[10] Through her work, Nakadate aims to establish herself as a host and a hostage simultaneously, diving deeper into the controversial issues of being an Asian American woman in a white, male dominated society.

Nakadate focuses on the ideas in feminism and empowers women to reverse the power in gender roles while putting herself in “dangerous situations with men.

[13] Art critic John Yau, in an article in The Brooklyn Rail on her 2011 retrospective, writes to the artist: "You explore a more unstable terrain, always intent on making 'a narrow escape,' the only option you see for yourself.

"[15] As pointed out by art critic John Yau on looking deeper into the messages of Nakadate's work “it doesn’t matter if an Asian American artist disavows race; she will be grouped as such because of an inherent institutional marginalization.

And even despite the well-documented continuation of institutional racism and gender.”[16] Nakadate portrays post–Asian American ideals and Yau’s concepts in her Strangers and Relations (2014) piece.

[16] Critics have noticed, especially through Nakadate’s work, her failure to address racial identity and believe that for “artists of color to transcend this institutional racism, they must continue making art that doesn’t reference race.”[16] New York Times critic Roberta Smith reviewed very favorably Nakadate's recent show, "Strangers and Relations (2013)," a show consisting of portraits of Americans distantly related to the artist (and located through DNA-testing), calling it "unusually gripping," and adding, "Ms. Nakadate’s nocturnes envelop us in darkness and tenderness and, as usual in her work, an unexpected intimacy opens up.