Another view, another way of coping
Quote of note:
Determined to flourish in a multicultural society, Shimomura likes the metaphor of a tossed-salad better than a melting pot.
Nothing about him has melted, and that includes his memories. They are the basis of his current show, but they do not shape its content.
In high school in 1958, he was dating a white girl from West Seattle against his better judgment, he says, as West Seattle was a well-known hotbed of racism. One night she told him to let her off a block from her home, as her father didn't want her dating "Oriental people" and would kill him if he came to the door. "You think I'm kidding?" she said.
"I remember her getting out of the car and walking away, down the street, past the headlights into the dark," he said.
That's his memory, and it's not what he painted. He painted a cool, Roy Lichtenstein blonde snuggling up to a yellow-skinned demon who licks her with an enormous tongue, a shotgun at his back. He painted himself as "the Jap" the father saw.
Shimomura Explores Racism in All Its Guises
By Regina Hackett
©2004 Seattle Post-Intelligencer
March 11, 2004
Enough about the victim. Let's hear from the perpetrator.
Roger Shimomura paints racist incidents from the racist's point of view. His cold, flat style -- a blend of American Pop and Japanese ukiyo-e or "floating world" graphics -- gets inside his hot subject and gives it a deadpan edge.
His paintings ring the front room at the Greg Kucera Gallery like small windows to a demented world. Beside each acrylic painting is a terse explanation of its contents, which creates a double-barrel effect: dry facts, fierce visuals.
At 64, Shimomura has a lifetime's worth of experience with racism in all its guises, from the bungling and insensitive to focused hatred. He collects its signs and symbols, including, he says, "Jap hunting licenses, slap-a-Jap cards and movie posters featuring yellow-face actors."
It's the kind of material his parents' generation shunned, but Shimomura agrees with African American painter Kara Walker, who uses racist stereotypes in her work in order to dominate and defuse them: "Change the joke and slip the yoke."
While Walker deals in archetypes, Shimomura gets personal with his own life. Most of these narratives are versions of incidents that happened to him.
