Published in conjunction with an exhibition of the same name (through December 13, 2014, at Washington State University's Museum of Art in Pullman), Roger Shimomura: An American Knockoff offers a crisp look at the recent work of this Seattle-born painter of Japanese descent, who spent some of his earliest years in a World War II internment camp in Hunt, Idaho. Forced ostracization helped shape Shimomura's sense of otherness, which has found expression in his work since the 1970s. Not surprisingly, some of the most powerful paintings reproduced in the exhibition catalog – which includes an essay by Anne Collins Goodyear and an interview with the artist – depict imagined images from those years. Because Shimomura was just three when he and his family were sent to Camp Minidoka, though, he relied upon translations of his grandmother's diaries to create pictures of the surreal circumstances of trying to live a normal American life while imprisoned. My favorite, "Classmates," captures two girls – one with Euro-American features, the other Japanese – holding ruby-red apples and smiling, seemingly untroubled by the barbed wire strung between them.
Other paintings in the book are comic-book-style self-portraits of the artist as iconic characters like George Washington (famously crossing the Delaware) and Superman (his trademark costume covered by a kimono). While these images may appear to be pop polemics designed to poke a thumb in the eye of some of America's most patriotic icons, the artist demurs: "Sometimes people mistake my usage of them as painting the enemy," he's quoted as saying. "But it really comes out of my visual reverence for them." For the artist, the paintings are conversation starters, as in "Shimomura Crossing the Delaware," which is supposed to make viewers ask themselves, 'What if George Washington had been Japanese American?' In other words, how might a heroic Japanese figure early in the nation's history have changed our culture? Well, one might answer, the current president of the United States is African American, and that fact has done little in many precincts to further the dialogue about race. But the lack of easy answers in Shimomura's work is fine with the artist. "If my work is seen as raising more questions than it answers," he says, "I'd be pleased…."
Roger Shimomura: An American Knockoff
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