Roger Shimomura is a Seattle born Japanese-American artist who creates innovative work inspired by his ethnic heritage. He deals with the social issues of race relations and cultural interface. His works are an aesthetic and political comparison between contemporary America and traditional Japan. He depicts his bicultural heritage in paintings and performance pieces that derive from his ironic mix, or complicated “layering” of Japanese imagery and popular American culture, building overlapping references to personal history, art history, pop culture, and current events.
Through deconstruction and reconstruction, his intentions are revealed in subtle and political ways. His early paintings and serigraphs presented humorous vignettes combining Hollywood icons and traditional stock characters, geishas and samurais to illustrate cultural overlays and distinctions that define everyday life. Kentucky Fried Chicken and sushi, cocktails and kimonos dramatize the double consciousness many “hyphenated” Americans feel, when society so often dwells on their otherness rather than their identity as Americans, even after several generations in the United States.
Shimomura uses comic juxtapositions placing all the players whether European, Asian or other origin, in humorous settings, where the viewers can laugh together at their collective prejudices and pretensions.
Lucy Lippard, in Mixed Blessings, writing about “Untitled, 1985, states “If Shimomura’s imagery is initially amusing- a cacophony of Disney and samurai, Superman and geishas, chopsticks and surfboards- there is a hidden agenda: a brown hand sprays Snow White with an aerosol can; a chain breaks across the face of a Kabuki player; a brushstroke of brown paint attacks the very pale skin of a “typical American teenager.” The multiple scenes in this untitled work are overseen by a silhouetted “FBI man” at the upper right, while on the lower left sitting glumly in a “cell” made of traditional Japanese screens, a perhaps revolutionary Pinocchio isn’t using his camera or rifle. (Outside, a warplane moves by and his alter ego runs past.) Donald Duck has entangled a samurai in a phallic garden hose and Wonder woman appears interested in a Japanese woman, ignoring the glaring male at the front of the painting. Shimomura’s imagery is intentionally ambiguous, but the meeting of East and West in full stereotype, in spite of themselves, seems to be his theme. His intricate compositions also have their source of viewpoint and stylization in both cultures.”
Shimomura states his early “ paintings and serigraphs... were inspired from all the toy stuff I was collecting.. They were large acrylic paintings that contained such things as Buck Rogers’ space ship, the Big Bad Wolf, Dick Tracy, Minnie Mouse, et al... At that point... I realized the only difference between Minnie Mouse and one of Utamaro’s beauties was race.” Shimomura was influenced by pop art images created by the artists Roy Lichtenstein and Andy Warhol, in addition to comic book images which later inspired him to begin making assemblage pieces.
The combination of Ukiyo-e and these art forms can be seen in the painting “Valeda Daze.” Shimomura explains: “ Valeda Daze is a painting with references to comic book images. Valeda is a Greek word meaning wise woman. Valeda goes back to my college days in the late 1950s, and early 1960s, when the sorority system at the University of Washington was for whites only. Persons of color that wanted to have similar experiences had to form their own sororities that were racially directed. Japanese Americans had one for men called Synkoa and for women it was called Valeda.
The triptych format is a metaphor for three generations of Japanese American; Issei, Nisei, and Sansei. The idea was that on the left I’d have a very Japanese view of things, on the right a very white American view and in the middle a mixture of the two cultures.” In the “Yellow No Same” series , he depicts his observation of a double-sided prejudice in American society in which all Asians are lumped into one ethnically interchangeable group. Each image in the series contrasts a male figure taken from Japanese woodblock prints with images of Japanese-Americans in the Minoka camp where Shimomura and his family were interned from 1942-1944. Separating the figures from each of these worlds are discrete lines of barbed wire silhouetted in black. Shimomura states, “To most non-Asians in this country, the differences between the Japanese, Chinese and other Asian people are either indistinguishable or immaterial. During World War II, this insensitivity was expressed by their failure to recognize the differences between the Japanese people and Americans of Japanese descent. Today, history is being forced to admit the gravity of this error of judgment.” (March 1992)
Shimomura’s intellectual exploration has led him to a more profound understanding of his complex personal history and its relevance to his life as an artist. Concomitant with his shift away from American Pop icons towards Japanese inspired imagery, he was reintroduced with his own background. Using his grandmother’s diaries and his own reflections, he created the “Minidoka” and “An American Diary” series of paintings, a process which allowed Shimomura to reclaim the Japanese part of his heritage and to reconcile it with his upbringing and orientation in America.
After his grandparent’s death, he discovered a rich collection of family documents and memorabilia that inspired him to examine their lives as immigrants and their years of internment. “ The diaries from the war years proved to especially evocative” Shimomura has explained, “inspiring in him both the desire to commemorate this reprehensible period in our nation’s history and to share its lessons with a new generation of Americans.” The paintings are flat, hard-edged forms and bright colors derived from the Pop Art idiom. Japanese motifs and decorative forms are combined with the more mundane world of 1940’s America. A radio, an apple pie, a Bible, and a silhouette of Superman are all depicted. This image of Superman, normally benign, appears to threaten his meditating grandmother. The painting’s attractiveness belies its serious content. Shimomura states the “dichotomy between craft and subject is probably appropriate, like memory brought back to focus.”
Shimomura’s works of art convey a sense of history, of a past still very real to many Japanese-Americans. Through the artwork, the history of the Japanese-American people is given a more immediate sense of reality, making it accessible to the understanding post-modern imagery. His images allow us to confront (often in painful recognition) and embrace another’s ethnicity.
