Report on Return of the Yellow Peril

A Survey of the Work of Roger Shimomura, 1969-2004.

Shimomura was born in Seattle in 1939. His family experienced one of the harshest instances of racism against Asian American citizens when they were among the 120,000 Japanese-Americans who were forced to give up most of their property and relocate to U.S. internment camps after the bombing of Pearl Harbor .At that time, he, who was only 3 years old, spent two years with his family behind a barbed-wire fence at Camp Minidoka in south-central Idaho. Following the war, he completed school in Seattle and studied commercial design at the University of Washington, receiving a BA in 1961. He received an MFA in painting at Syracuse University in 1969 and started to teach in the University of Kansas until 1994, rising to become a University Distinguished Professor.

Shimomura has had over 100 solo and 200 group exhibitions in the US, Canada, and Japan and has lectured as a visiting artist at over 200 universities, art schools, and museums across the country. His experience as an Asian-American professor in Kansas led him to paint about culture, discrimination, and ethnic stereotypes.

Some people think Shimomura is “a prankster with a brush”. In my opinion, that’s quite true according to my first impression to this exhibition. The works are so vivid and colorful, they contain inviting American tableaus, and they also depict some of his childhood scenes which were actual and also fantastic in an art work.

People also say Shimomura is “a social commentator whose art represents a unique Japanese-American style and point of view”. By my primary impression, I would think these painting are not as pretty as Impressionist Paintings, not as lovely as Japanese comic. While after knowing some context of the exhibition, I think it is unique ,and the comment about Shimomura is much truer. I can easily see Shimomura’s effort to explore the relationships and contrasts between Japanese and American culture from his painting. For example, there’s a picture titled “Jap’s Jap” from the Stereotype series; in this work, Shimomura depicts himself as a Japanese-American Donald Duck, painting his self-portrait as a European-American counterpart, decked out with Scottish bagpipes, tam, and tartan. This picture is just so weird, funny (which is not amusing funny) but with a black humor, and attractive.

The Return of the Yellow Peril directly plays on the derogatory color metaphors for Asians—“Yellow peril” or “Yellow terror” that have been aimed Asian-Americans since the 1800s, which bought to our mind that the painter’s 2 years living behind a barbed-wire fence (as mention above); theses works mean a lot, not only to the painter, also to all of us.

 A person like me with a shallow thought on racism, politics and sociology may not profoundly tell the inside meaning in Shimomura’s painting, but from my one-year experience in Europe as an Asian exchange student when I was only 16 years old, I can deeply feel the emotion that Shimomura may have before that sometimes lonely, sometimes confused, and more often conflicted, about who we are, how we look on the “culture shock” or “culture identity” and  how we live among this by adapting to it.

In the present time, racial discrimination may be less than yesterday, but it’s not extinct, and there’re still biases somehow. I think what Shimomura had experienced, studied and created will definitely inspire a lot of people, to think about the issue of culture identity, discrimination, and ethnic stereotypes, and some of them will make a difference some day.

Report on Janice Radway’ lecture

“Zines Then and Now: 

What Are They? What Do You Do With Them? How Do They Work?”

Janice Radway, the Walter Dill Professor of Communication and professor of American studies and gender studies at Northwestern University, gave a lecture about social impact and literary role of zines on American society on Nov.17.

Prof. Radway first discussed the definition and scope of zines—“A zine (an abbreviation of the word fanzine, or magazine) is most commonly a small circulation, non-commercial publication of original or appropriated texts and images”—as she showed us the definition on Wikipedia and the sample of zines on slide show, she brought up the question “what else people can do with it but read it (like a book)”. Indeed, just like books , people engaged in zinging more than read them ,at the same time, they have their own subjectivity thinking, they are participating in different kind of activities and performances which connected with social relations and culture values.

In Prof. Radway’s investigation on girls’ zines , a lot of girls who engaged in zinging actively in 1990s have given up as they turned to their twenties or thirties at the turn of 21 century --the information era. While actually, zines moved on, too. So how do zines function over time?

Prof. Radway gave some examples of girls’ zines collections which are quite representative. She studied what girls’ zines are and how zines connected with girls and other zines from these cases. Here’re some conclusions by myself from here speech--zines are (mostly) made by girls, for girls; they are a way to depict how girls think ,write and respond to the society to express themselves; they have charms and they’re highly miscellaneous forms “displaying a wild mixture of handwriting and print”; they touch on sex, punk music, movie stars, diet & beauty, whatever may be hot conversation topics the next day in school among classmates, which is how they help to build up alliances, friendships and sisterhoods, they’re part of the social community; zines are always related to zines, you can often see one recommend another, just like the social network between people, they “re-circulate culture discourses” and “alter them by juxtaposing and combining them”.

As Professor Radway concluded, zines bring hopes to a different future and the social construction. And in this high-tech era, whether paper zines or e-zines, I believe, zines will never grow old, it will continue even in a new media and area, bearing girls’ dream , self-excitation, sweetness, or any characteristics that made it such a charming thing within modern media publishing.