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.