Shimomura explores a vast injustice

Seattle native Roger Shimomura established himself as an artist in the 1970s with his gutsy fusions of Japanese and American imagery, an ironic way of combating cultural gaffes he encountered as a sansei, or third-generation Japanese American. The results were often a hoot. By mixing the comic-strip simplicity of American Pop art with the similarly flat and contrived images of Japanese ukiyo-e prints, he ended up with stereotypes butting heads — or having sex, as the case may be.

The smartness and the formal rigor of that earlier work is undeniable, but in hindsight Shimomura seems to have been scratching the surface of a cultural collision rather than getting to its core. Fortunately, he kept at it. When he began to probe his memories of being interned as a young boy with his family at Camp Minidoka, Idaho, Shimomura arrived at a place that has kept him — and us — engaged for a long time. Here the racial and cultural issues the artist once poked fun at become disturbing and deeply personal.

The paintings are as beautiful and smart as ever, as you can see in "Minidoka on My Mind," a major show of Shimomura's recent paintings at Greg Kucera Gallery. It makes a nice companion to "Japan Envisions the West" (opening its second installment at Seattle Art Museum Saturday), with each exhibition offering views on the uneasy mingling of Japanese and Western cultures, but from opposite sides of the Pacific. In both you will see odd marriages of style and unorthodox uses of the classic Japanese screen format.

That's the arrangement Shimomura chose for his ambitious four-panel painting "American Infamy," the kind of broad perspective scene Japanese screens were made to accommodate. In Shimomura's view, you look down at an expanse of the internment camp, with its rows of primitive barracks threaded through wafting clouds in an ever so graceful, Japanese-style composition.

People cluster and children play in their little community with its distant barricade of barbed wire and a beckoning stream just out of reach. What pulls us up short is the huge and looming, very un-Japanese-style military guard in the foreground, a figure who dominates the picture — and the little people below — from his high lookout. The Japanese Americans he's surveying have defined faces and bright colored clothing but the guard is just a dark silhouette, a voyeur staring through his binoculars at the innocent detainees below. Those ominous charcoal clouds drifting through the bright Idaho day are likely a mechanism of memory, a metaphor, a compositional tool for ordering a rubble of impressions from the distant past.

Shimomura, now 68 and living in Lawrence, Kan., has said that he no longer is certain what he actually remembers from those early childhood experiences and what he later imagined from reading and talking to fellow detainees over the years. That's not the point anyway. What he's exploring is the vast injustice that crushed many in his parents' generation, both economically and psychologically, and that left Shimomura and his contemporaries growing up with a silent burden. Nobody wanted to talk about it, just move on.

That's why this series of Shimomura's seems to strike a chord for so many people. While it's no doubt therapeutic for the artist, the work also acts as a catalyst that helps the rest of us wrap our minds around a nasty stretch of history as it trickled down to our neck of the world.

The title painting for the show depicts the artist shrunk back to childhood to re-create the formative experience of being imprisoned. He paints it like a comic strip, the kind of art he knew back then: smooth planes of color and bold graphics. The bare 2-by-4-inch studs of the building and the steep vertical format of the picture implant the notion of bars and imprisonment.

And the row after row of barbed wire stretching behind the wall reinforce the idea. The young artist, looking especially small and vulnerable in his oversized hand-me-down clothing, dutifully paints what he sees. Yet, somehow, for all the pointed content, the paintings don't come across as gloomy. Shimomura can't help injecting a certain levity and a massive dose of pure visual pleasure — the sugar that makes the medicine go down. As he puts it: "I offer this exhibition as a metaphor for the impending threat posed by current times, and as a warning and reminder that during international crises our government seems to consistently lose its memory regarding past mistakes."

Sheila Farr: sfarr@seattletimes.com