Different Citizens. Roger Shimomura, 2009.
Acrylic on canvas, 36" x 45". Courtesy of the artist.
In the exhibition “Yellow Terror: The Collections and Paintings of Roger Shimomura” at the Wing Luke Asian Museum, Roger Shimomura’s painting Different Citizens says it all. On the right we see a modest, graying self portrait of the artist, on the left the absurd caricature of a smiling Japanese military officer with buck teeth, yellow skin, oversized ears, and slanted eyes. Shimomura is showing us the racist lens that filters perceptions of Japanese Americans. Even more blatant is Roger and Janet, where the artist himself is depicted as the big mouth, buck-toothed stereotype with big ears and a screaming mouth next to his blond, blue- eyed wife.
The largest painting in the exhibition, Yellow Terror, (2009) has dozens of caricatures of Japanese soldiers and officers who tumble, crash, and collide. The artist is in the center of this mayhem, pushing his eyes into a slant, as though creating this nightmare vision of Japanese caricatures by altering his sight. Opposite the painting are “smash that Jap” World War II postcards, one of Shimomura’s collections referred to in the title of the exhibition. Shimomura has copied the caricatures precisely. While the postcards also ridicule the Japanese enemy as a snake, a fox, a beetle, a monkey, and a pig, Shimomura only borrows the human caricatures. We can see exactly how Shimomura’s art relates to its sources. He has created an “all over composition” and “action painting” with his cartoon sources, a parody of the grand manner of American art in the nineteen fifties when he came of age. But the sources and their accumulation in his painting are far more than a formal reference; they are also the social context for Shimomura’s art.
Throughout the two small galleries of this intense exhibition, paintings face salt and paper shakers, comics, buttons, films and film posters, popular music sheets, dart games, and costume accessories like Fu Manchu masks and mustaches. In a side corridor are racist movie posters for films like the 1931 Daughter of the Dragon with Anna May Wong, and Charlie Chan (a yellow-face white actor which the Fox Network not long ago tried to revive), sheet music (Ching Ching Chinaman - whites do not differentiate Chinese and Japanese), and a compilation of film clips and animated cartoons.
Shimomura directly represents some of the film characters in his paintings: Mr.Wong from the racist internet cartoon appears doing the bidding of his white female boss. Falling Son,(2000), features Joe Jitsu (Dick Tracy’s slant-eyed martial arts instructor assistant) falling into an American flag held by Huey, Dewey, and Louie.
But more than depicting and transforming racist popular culture into stunning paintings, Shimomura is showing us, in this particular exhibition, that racism infests our lives without our even being aware of it. He takes the pop art model and gives it more political punch, and intense content. These paintings are funny, sarcastic, ironic, and deadpan all at once.
In 1942 Shimomura, an American citizen and third generation Japanese-American, was sent off as a three-year-old to a Japanese internment camp in Minidoka, Idaho. Shimomura came out of the camps and immersed himself in popular culture, particularly super hero comic books like Dick Tracy and Superman, but he knew he was different from the all-American 1950s white norms. His 1988 mural at the Westlake metro stop in the Seattle bus tunnel meticulously represents the collision of American and Japanese culture that he experienced as a teenager. He combines sixties Pop art, modernist compositions, and Japanese references like Kabuki actors and the curving lines of Ukiyo-e prints.
Shimomura first obliterated the critical barrier between art and political engagement in his work that refers to the World War II Japanese internment. Those prints and paintings from the 1980s and 1990s are based on his grandmother’s diaries as well as his own (fragmentary) childhood memories. They are complex compositions based on abstract modernism, highly saturated colors, and black outlines that convey the intensity of this experience distilled through years of deep concern that it not be forgotten.
Shimomura creates absurdly exaggerated stereotypes as a major strategy to keep us laughing even as we recognize his indictment of racism. In Jap’s a Jap no 7, for example, a huge mouth full of buck teeth almost fills the whole painting. With the increase in racist stereotyping following the 9/11 bombings, Shimomoura’s series “Stereotypes and Admonitions” (2004) directly tackled the racism he experienced as a high school student in Seattle, as a professor of art in Kansas, and as a member of the art world. He brought the series up to the present with withering comments on the inherent racism of sports teams and cable channel television series as well as more overt hate crimes. Several of those paintings are included in the current exhibition. My favorites are those referring to the art world such as I Know a Japanese,where he parodies himself giving a lecture from a podium wearing the garb of a Kabuki actor. He depicts his understanding of the audience’s perception of him as a foreigner rather than an art professor. According to the wall text, after the lecture a student asked him where he came from in Japan.
In 2007, Shimomura made a direct connection between the illegal internments at Guantanamo, the suspension of civil rights, and the new U.S. surveillance society with his series “Minidoka on my Mind.” The large American Infamy no. 2 (2006) places us in the tower with the man who has control over surveillance of the internment camp. (see my blog Art and Politics Now on December 1, 2007 for a review of that show)
The Wing Luke exhibition is the first time that Shimomura has shown his kitsch collections beside his paintings. Never before has he revealed the extent to which his art extracts racist stereotypes directly from popular culture. Although much of this material is historical, the problem is not behind us. The stereotypes are still with us. At the opening of the exhibition, the artist pointed out a new racist film "The Goods, Live Hard Sell Hard" which features a mob beating up a Japanese American.
The collection of kitsch allows the pain, the art, and the humor of the paintings to emerge all the more forcefully. When we think of Roy Lichtenstein’s war and love themes we can identify Shimomura’s point of departure, but Shimomura warps those themes based on his own experiences, particularly, as we see here, by interracial dating in a hostile post-war America. But this warping is what makes his art so affecting. Although he began to focus on Japanese internment as a result of the emphasis on identity art in the 1990s, he is not promoting identity, nostalgia or essentialism and is not a cultural nationalist. As an American, he is talking about mainstream perceptions of people of color, their biases and their fears.
His tour-de-force three part American Portrait (2002) displays all of his skills in combining styles from modernist to cartoon to realism to Ukiyo’e without missing a beat. But here we clearly see that each character represents a different perspective isolated in its own construction of reality. In the first panel, the artist’s cartoon friends turn their back on him, represented here as he really looks, a somber, grey haired man. In the second panel the main figure is a Kabuki actor and in the third, the bucktooth World War II Japanese officer takes center stage. American Portrait is both funny and very, very sad. That contradiction is at the heart of Shimomura’s art.
In Eternal Foreigner no 10 (2007)a tall narrow painting at the end of the exhibition, the artist represents himself, the distinguished professor, in a white martial arts outfit jumping high above the land with a great kick. This is wonderful painting that underscores that the way we see is often a reflection of the way we think. Shimomura as a transcendent martial arts master is one way I like to think of him, outmaneuvering us with his amazing insights, his courage, and his humor.
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