Art and Memory in the Work - Greg Kucera · 2015. 11. 10. · Shimomura’s previous works....

An Autumn Afternoon (1962), Yasujiro Ozu’s

masterful movie about an aging military officer’s

dealings with his old friends and growing children,

is striking for, among other things, its infusion of

Western visual elements in what is otherwise a

quintessential Japanese chamber play. Throughout

the film a series of modern objects signals the cultural

changes introduced in postwar Japan as the country

embraced the industrial model. Thus, traditional

Japanese interiors are infiltrated by mass produced

icons such as juice cartons, soda bottles, electric

rice cookers, golf clubs and kitchen clocks. Outside,

images of factory chimneys and a baseball arena

alternate with scenes of urban life amid neon signs

mixed in with rice paper lamps. Ozu’s juxtaposition of

old and new might be considered an early instance of

the Pop Art aesthetics that would inform a few years

later the films of Jean-Luc Godard that captured the

city of Paris rebounding after World War II.

But the art of juxtaposition, of course, is not

a postwar invention. In The Futurist Moment:

Avant-Garde, Avant Guerre, and the Language of

Rupture, literary critic Marjorie Perloff dedicated an

entire chapter to the subject, noting that collage is

“perhaps the central artistic invention of the avant

guerre.”2 In an effort to understand the relevance of

the technique, Perloff traces its origins to the tradition

of pasted papers in twelfth-century Japan, whose

haphazard style she differentiates from the rigorous

structure of juxtaposition that characterizes the

work of early twentieth century avant-gardists. The

latter, she writes, incorporate “directly into the work

an actual fragment of the referent, thus forcing the

reader or viewer to consider the interplay between

preexisting message or material and the new artistic

composition that results from the graft.”3

Roger Shimomura eschews anything

extraneous attached to the surface of his paintings

and prints, and yet his work can also be discussed

in terms of juxtaposition. The central question as

one goes about exploring his work relates, of course,

to the referent. Or putting it differently: what do

Shimomura’s juxtapositions refer to? For, to quote

Perloff again, juxtaposition, or collage, seems

to be “an intuitive grasp of how the world might

be put together.”4

Art and Memory in the Work of Roger ShimomuraAntonio Sergio Bessa

Life is a mixed-media affair—John Ashbery1

Great American Muse #1, 2013

Born to second generation Japanese American

parents in Seattle in 1939, Roger Shimomura’s

world underwent serious turmoil in the aftermath

of Pearl Harbor as his family was incarcerated in

Camp Minidoka in Southern Idaho. Memories of life

in the camp as registered by the mind of a three-

year-old boy have been the impetus in several of

Shimomura’s previous works. Throughout his career,

haunting images related to that specific period of

his life are often mixed up with broader reflections

on the rages of war, militarism, and patriarchal rule.

And in order to put together his visions of the world,

Shimomura delves into an eclectic repository of art

styles, both from Western and Eastern traditions,

mixing traditional Japanese woodblock print imagery

with manga and American comics, packed with art

historical references. One could say, a war of styles?

Shimomura’s series Great American Muse,

inspired by Tom Wesselmann’s series Great American

Nude, continues his exploration of the method he

has pursued since the early 1970s. As in previous

works, American Pop Art is a complicated influence,

at once liberating and constrictive. As in the films of

Ozu and Godard, Pop Art indicates that America has

won the cultural war by infiltrating every crevice of

local traditions with its own brand of modernity. The

utopia of high modernism, represented here through

references to Mondrian, is literally placed in the toilet,

or otherwise relegated to the area of fashion. Thus,

Shimomura’s juxtapositions tell a story, a complicated

one for that matter. And its main stakes are only

revealed slowly, depending on how far the viewer is

willing to go.

by American media. I suggest that Shimomura’s

strategy is closer to Rosler’s than that of the classic

Pop artists that he so genuinely admires. Consider

for example his six-panel work Rape of Nanking

(1997), in the collection of the Bronx Museum.

The work was inspired by the 1937 siege of the city

of Nanking by the Japanese, and Shimomura

drew on a number of popular cultural signifiers and

different styles of illustration from Japan and China

to convey the complex power struggle between the

two nations.

MARTHA ROSLER“Balloons” from the series House Beautiful: Bringing the War Homec. 1967-72Photomontage24 by 20 in. 61 by 50.8 cm.

Courtesy of the artist and Mitchell-Innes & Nash, NY

The first painting in the series, for example,

depicts a Japanese woman smiling in the foreground,

while in the background an airplane is in full attack.

Is the woman naked lying in bed, or sitting by her

kitchen? Is there really an attack going on in the

background, or is that an artwork by Roy Lichtenstein?

Furthermore, one might ask: is the work about

the war or a sexual pun? In this work and in those

that follow, memory, history and art juxtapose in

complex ways hinting at narratives that never resolve

themselves neatly. Consider yet the ambivalence

of Great American Muse #32, in which a young girl

faces the image of a raging pilot. Is the girl a possible

casualty in a war field or is she in a museum looking

at another Lichtenstein? Equally puzzling is the next

painting in the series that shows two cartoon kids in

front of a Lichtenstein parody of Picasso. With their

perfectly round heads, the kids are abstractions just

like the kind pursued by Picasso and Lichtenstein. On

second inspection, however, they also hint at genetic

deformity caused by chemical warfare or over the

counter drugs such as Thalidomide, made available

after the war.

The Pop era, as recycled by Shimomura,

was indeed a complicated affair. One might consider

that by drawing from the exciting graphics of comic

books, artists like Roy Lichtenstein made the violence

of war more palatable to American audiences. In

contrast, works like Martha Rosler’s photo-collage

series House Beautiful: Bringing the War Home

(1967-1972) offered an alternate narrative of the era

by simply throwing together in the same frame the

disparate visual information disseminated

1 Ashbery, John, Collages: They Knew What They Wanted (New York: Tibor de Nagy Gallery, 2008).

2 Perloff, Marjorie, The Futurist Moment: Avant-Garde, Avant Guerre, and the Language of Rupture (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1986), xviii.

3 Ibid.4 Ibid., 72.

Compared with Rape of Nanking, the works in

the Great American Muse series might strike the viewer

as less forceful, a mere exercise in style. That would be

a serious error of judgment, which might be corrected

by a closer examination of the elements in the mix.

Consider, for example, the scene of two women

talking across a barbed wire fence in Great American

Muse #21 cheerfully rehashing the artist’s anguished

memories of Minidoka. The two women, Shimomura

suggested to me in an email, could “possibly have

been classmates before camp separated them.” And

there we have, in one snapshot, the complicated

mixed-media affair that life is made of.

Antonio Sergio Bessa, PhD, is the Director of Curatorial

and Education Programs at The Bronx Museum of the

Arts, and a museum education teacher at Columbia

University’s Teachers College. As a curator and scholar,

he has organized several exhibitions, and been widely

published, on the subject of concrete poetry.

In the late 1960s I enrolled at Syracuse University, New York, to pursue a Masters of Fine Arts degree in painting. At that time the Pop Art phenomenon was in full bloom in New York City. While Pop was generally understood as cool and detached, I was interested in making it hot and relevant. With this realization, seeds were planted and a lifetime of juxtaposing images that reflect both mainstream and cultural values began to germinate. In retrospect I think I was endorsing one popular definition of Post Modernism as “finding the deeper meaning of life through comic books.”

A few years ago my wife gave me a book on artist Tom Wesselmann that caused me to re-examine his paintings, drawings, and collages. Even though I was quite familiar with Wesselmann’s work, I hadn’t really focused upon his “Great American Nude” series. Suddenly I appreciated and understood that these compositions were based upon fixed sets of images and locales, such as the female figure, kitchen, bathroom, groceries, art, and appliances. Upon this realization, I began to juxtapose similar images that I had used in my own work, through the years, images that commonly had ethnic connotations such as woodblock prints, World War II, samurai, and geisha. I discovered that the level of interpretation rose exponentially, as each additional component brought its own history and associations. This resulted in endless possibilities for dialogue and debate.

Ultimately, there is no correct nor best interpretation of each painting, but I invite each viewer to express and share their own interpretations. In this manner I hope that the conversation will continue long after viewing the work in person.

—Roger Shimomura, 2015

Great American Muse #2, 2013 Great American Muse #4, 2013





















All paintings are acrylic on canvas, 24 x 24 inches.





















Exhibition List


Roger Shimomura’s paintings, prints, and theatre

pieces address sociopolitical issues of ethnicity.

He was born in Seattle, Washington, in 1939, and

spent two early years of his childhood in Minidoka

(Idaho), one of ten American concentration camps

for Japanese Americans during WWII.

Shimomura received a B.A. degree (1961) from

the University of Washington, Seattle, and an M.F.A.

(1969) from Syracuse University, New York. He has

had over 130 solo exhibitions of paintings and prints,

as well as presented his experimental theater pieces at

such venues as the Franklin Furnace, New York City;

Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; and The Smithsonian

Institution, Washington, DC.

He is the recipient of more than thirty grants,

of which four are National Endowment for the

Arts Fellowships in Painting and Performance Art.

Shimomura has been a visiting artist and lectured on

his work at more than 200 universities, art schools,

and museums across the country. In 1999, the Seattle

Urban League designated a scholarship in his name

that has been awarded annually to a Seattle resident

pursuing a career in art.

In 2002 he received the College Art Association

Distinguished Body of Work Award. The following

year, he delivered the keynote address at the 91st

annual meeting of CAA in New York City. In 2003,

he was a recipient of the Joan Mitchell Foundation

Painting Award. In 2006, he was accorded the

Distinguished Alumnus Award from the School of Arts

& Sciences, University of Washington, Seattle, and in

2011 was one of fifty alumni to be presented with the

university’s “150th Anniversary Timeless Award.”

A 1994 winner of the Kansas Governor’s Arts

Award, in 2008, Shimomura was designated the first

Kansas Master Artist and also honored by the Asian

American Arts Alliance, N.Y.C. as “Exceptional People

in Fashion, Food & the Arts.” In 2011 Shimomura was

designated a United States Artist Fellow in Visual Arts.

In 2012 he delivered the commencement address to

Garfield High School, Seattle, his alma mater, then

elected to the Hall of Fame.

Shimomura began teaching at the University

of Kansas, Lawrence, KS in 1969. In the fall of 1990,

Shimomura held an appointment as the Dayton

Hudson Distinguished Visiting Professor at Carleton

College, Northfield, Minnesota. During his teaching

career at the University of Kansas he was the first

faculty member ever to be designated a University

Distinguished Professor (1994), receive the Higuchi

Research Prize (1998) and the Chancellor’s Club

Career Teaching Award (2002). In 2004, he retired

from teaching and started the Shimomura Faculty

Research Support Fund, an endowment to foster

faculty research in the Department of Art.

Shimomura’s work is in the permanent

collections of over 100 museums nation wide

including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

City; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York

City; The Bronx Museum of the Arts, Bronx, New York;

Art Institute of Chicago; Nelson-Atkins Museum

of Art, Kansas City, Missouri; Seattle Art Museum;

Portland Art Museum, Portland, Oregon; Museum

of American Art and the National Portrait Gallery,

Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC.

His personal papers and letters are being

collected by the Archives of American Art,

Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC.

He is represented by Flomenhaft Gallery, New York

City and Greg Kucera Gallery, Seattle.

Artist Biography

212 Third Ave South Seattle, WA 98104www.gregkucera.com

Art and Memory in the Work - Greg Kucera · 2015. 11. 10. · Shimomura’s previous works....

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