Post on 26-Jan-2021
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
Great American Muse #6, 2013 Great American Muse #7, 2013
Great American Muse #8, 2013 Great American Muse #9, 2013
Great American Muse #11, 2013 Great American Muse #13, 2013
Great American Muse #15, 2013 Great American Muse #16, 2013
Great American Muse #17, 2013 Great American Muse #20, 2013
Great American Muse #21, 2013 Great American Muse #22, 2013
Great American Muse #25, 2013 Great American Muse #27, 2013
Great American Muse #28, 2013 Great American Muse #29, 2013
Great American Muse #30, 2013 Great American Muse #31, 2015
Great American Muse #32, 2015 Great American Muse #33, 2015
Great American Muse #34, 2015 Great American Muse #35, 2015
Great American Muse #36, 2015 Great American Muse #37, 2015
Great American Muse #38, 2015 Great American Muse #39, 2015
Great American Muse #40, 2015 Great American Muse #41, 2015
Great American Muse #42, 2015 Great American Muse #43, 2015
Great American Muse #44, 2015 Great American Muse #45, 2015
Great American Muse #46, 2015 Great American Muse #47, 2015
Great American Muse #48, 2015 Great American Muse #49, 2015
Great American Muse #1, 2013
Great American Muse #2, 2013
Great American Muse #4, 2013
Great American Muse #6, 2013
Great American Muse #7, 2013
Great American Muse #8, 2013
Great American Muse #9, 2013
Great American Muse #11, 2013
Great American Muse #13, 2013
Great American Muse #15, 2013
Great American Muse #16, 2013
Great American Muse #17, 2013
Great American Muse #20, 2013
Great American Muse #21, 2013
Great American Muse #22, 2013
Great American Muse #25, 2013
Great American Muse #27, 2013
Great American Muse #28, 2013
Great American Muse #29, 2013
Great American Muse #30, 2013
All paintings are acrylic on canvas, 24 x 24 inches.
Great American Muse #31, 2015
Great American Muse #32, 2015
Great American Muse #33, 2015
Great American Muse #34, 2015
Great American Muse #35, 2015
Great American Muse #36, 2015
Great American Muse #37, 2015
Great American Muse #38, 2015
Great American Muse #39, 2015
Great American Muse #40, 2015
Great American Muse #41, 2015
Great American Muse #42, 2015
Great American Muse #43, 2015
Great American Muse #44, 2015
Great American Muse #45, 2015
Great American Muse #46, 2015
Great American Muse #47, 2015
Great American Muse #48, 2015
Great American Muse #49, 2015
Great American Muse #50, 2015
Exhibition List
Great American Muse #50, 2015
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