The Japanese-American artistic response has undergone a transformation along with the culture of the United States. Many artists express the difficulty of achieving meaningful dialogue and communication amongst racial, ethnic and cultural groups in our country, which is in flux due to economic, political and social changes. There is a new vernacular which has emerged within the culture of Japanese-American artists. In the past Japanese-American artistic response has too often been shaped, canonized and colonized by the bureaucratic elites in the arts community. Many Japanese-American artists were only seen as tokens, minority members fulfilling affirmative action slots, or their talents were wasted to amuse those with enough money to buy the “exotic” in the U.S. In the 1990’s, Japanese-American artists were increasingly articulating their own non-elite culture, a new culture that has grown out of a multi-American view that addresses important topics on the condition of their race, ethnicity, gender and other issues through a variety of media. In their attempt to reconcile two divergent cultural traditions, they have explored their relationship to mainstream American culture as both outside observers (taking the role of commentators on cross-cultural connections and confrontations) and active participants.
Japanese-American visual expression has yet no theories and no master narrative. It is a youthful, amorphous medium that is still trying to find its own identity. Artists represent visually an array of vibrant, distinctive modes of expression that permeate a variety of fields and disciplines. It manifests itself in conversations amongst artists, historians, film scholars, theorists, phenomenologists and anthropologists. The construction of Japanese-American artistic production is thus interdisciplinary, as it responds to art, history, literature, media and culture. Artists are deliberately engaging in their craftsmanship the use of imagery and metaphor to illuminate content that is subject to many possible interpretations, highlighting aspects of post modern art that reveal some of their deepest concerns today: the nature of personal identity and social responsibility in our pluralistic society, and the “truth” of history.
Japanese-American visual expression has reconfigured structures of identity. Artists blend modernism with accepted histories to create responses of radical openness to reveal the racial and media systems of control. Many art products challenge the social perceptions of the role of truth, lies and their consequences through transformation and adaptation of imagery and media. The resulting artworks have become vehicles of cultural assimilation and differentiation, telling the stories that risk being forgotten of a past that has become increasingly valued, and a present that is accessible to larger audiences, in an attempt to present a broader spectrum of American cultural production.
Acrimonious treatment and incarceration has been documented by Margo Machida in “A View From Within, Japanese American Art From The Internment Camps 1942-1945.” She examined the art created by the incarcerated Japanese-Americans. She “contextualizes the artistic expression and personal visions created during the years of hardship and isolation. These images range from protest to an assembly of representations of anger then hope. The beauty which emerged in these circumstances were astounding. In spite the dark isolation reinforced by the barbed wire and armed guards, the inhabitants of the camps managed to view their art as a positive way to escape the pain of incarceration. Some of the art shows the internee’s confusion between the loyalty to the U.S. and their feelings of betrayal and hatred for being treated as aliens in their own country. It also showed the pride they felt within and their deeply rooted connection to their culture and their past.”
Sociologically, as a consequence of devaluation by the dominate culture, Japanese-Americans historically functioned as a peculiar kind of “other” (amongst other others) in the symbolic economy of America. They are now being held up as the “model minority” to prove the viability of American egalitarian ideals. Many Japanese-American artists have a common stake in how they address their lives within their positions in this country. The acculturation (a process by which continuous contact between two or more distinct societies causes cultural change) of Japanese ancestry with American experience and needs has been subjected to mariginalization and isolation, resulting in an identity that is characterized by complexity and contradiction. Although Japanese-Americans were not overtly forced into the American way of life (as Africans, Mexicans and Native Americans), they possessed established cultural norms from Japan and participated culturally on separate and unequal terms. Japanese-Americans were not publicly intimidated by, nor did they feel their culture was robbed or undermined by, the dominant society. Instead, they developed a dual cultural frame of reference, one derived from their home ancestry and the other derived from their new host society. They have both discovered and invented homelands for themselves. There has been a confusion of identity for many Japanese-Americans, a century and a half after arrival in America. Americans of Japanese ancestry still remain “foreigners” in their homeland. “As Asians they have never been fully accepted in America” according to K.W. Lee an observer of Asian American life. “Whether their ancestors have been here four or five generations, they are still held as foreigners. It is as if you can never become full-blooded American citizens as long as you have Asian features.” In the development of modern and post modern art Japanese-American visual art expression has both energized the field of American art and eroded its former Euroamerocentric integrity in changing fundamental conceptions of what it is to be an American, by producing art that can both catalyze and cauterize.
In the early 1980’s the presence of Japanese-Americans (and collectively all Asian Americans) as artists was acknowledged on a national stage. Innovative and ambitious studies and exhibitions appeared in significant numbers during the last decades, and developments in American art commanded more attention within the discipline of art history as a whole. This growth has been stimulated by an expansiveness and liberality that has blurred the boundaries of the field and has revealed the visual culture of the United States to be a rich and complex infusion that tells us more about an America we recognize and share than about any of the separate groups a particular artist might seem to represent. Many artworks are constructed out of social interactions that are confirmed as being important through deconstruction (taking apart, particularly from the standpoint of motive or agenda) and reconstruction (or interpretation) by the artist’s position, in which case their reconstruction of the same material will inevitably be different. There is an attempt to reveal the existence of paradoxical themes, allusions to discrepant periods in history or cultural contradictions, hidden within the artwork. The relationship between Japanese-American art and the changing society around it has reached beneath the surface of the stereotypical Japanese- American image of passive acceptance “gamman” (endurance) “shikata ga nai” (it cannot be helped) and survival to reflect on all kinds of crosscurrents in American culture. Japanese-American artists frequently contend with the emotional dimension of their changing circumstances in America as they search for new meanings and definitions that will bestow sense and clarity on their altered lives
Mitsuo Toshida, who came to America after WW II, was unprepared for the difficulty in acclimating to his new life in New York. In “LABYRINTH OF SOLITUDE,” 1987, he represents the dislocation he experienced by employing an image of Frankenstein the monster (a theme of transformation) to articulate his distress and loneliness at a time when he most wanted to fit in, to be understood and accepted. Using paired motifs, one of the monster’s face, “arrayed sequentially like separate frames in an unreeling film and the other a geometric grid (an allusion to the fact that to an initiated Asian- even one from a society as supposedly Westernized as Japan- life in America can seem like an unfathomable maze), Toshida evokes the estrangement and incomprehension he experienced during a period of uneasy solitude. Thus, the artist employs the monster’s image not to identify with the fictional creature’s rampaging anger but because in its halting attempts to reach out to those it met after escaping its creator, it found itself misjudged and ultimately persecuted” The Frankenstein monster became a personal metaphor for Toshida’s isolation from other members of society in his difficult adaption to America. Toshida confronted his growing sense of vulnerability after eight years of living in America when he contemplated the possibility that he might not be able to fully reintegrate himself into Japanese society should he ever return to Japan.
In “Shifted Center,” 1987, he described his living in the United States as a “drama of alienation and assimilation.” He questioned and tried to unravel what it meant to consider himself a Japanese who was no longer “completely Japanese, concomitantly, he was confused about the meaning of being American. Margo Machida in “Identities in Contemporary Asian American Art” describes “Shifted Center” as “a mazelike form signifying Toshida’s confusion in an adopted culture, bracketed by mirror images of an Asian applying theatrical makeup (indicative of the pressure the artist feels to put on a ‘face’ appropriate to his new society). Below, Toshida includes a poignant abstract motif in which a small square, sundered from a far larger one, conveying what it had meant for him to make the uneasy shift, laden with the potential for isolation, from a culture that greatly values group identity to one centered on the primacy of the individual.”
Takako Nagai , was born in Japan and came to America as a nineteen year old to study. But returning to Japan after having spent only three year in the West; she experienced dislocation. She recalls “when I went back to Tokyo I realized my psychology had changed. After living in this (American) culture my soul was no longer Japanese.” She returned to the U.S. and became a permanent resident. Nagai represents her struggle for acculturation/assimilation and her desire to unify East and West -past and present - in “Self-Portrait, 1990.” (Oil and mixed media on canvas) She reveals her disconcertion through the image of a kimono, (traditional Japan) engulfed in flames. She painted the cultural emblem embodying the continuity of her heritage as a Japanese woman on a ground of pages torn from American newspapers. Nagai emphasized her desire to anchor her changing identity in her newly naturalized country. Although she was intent in her determination to adjust to America, her anxiety is evident in the inscription of Japanese calligraphy asking, “Who knows how my road ought to be/Who knows how my life ends up?”
