Roger Shimomura

Roger Shimomura is an American artist and a retired professor at the University of Kansas, having taught there from 1969 to 2004. His art, showcased across the United States, Japan, Canada, Mexico, and Israel, often combines American popular culture, traditional Asian tropes, and stereotypical racial imagery to provoke thought and debate on issues of identity and social perception.

Career
In 2013, he told an interviewer,

"My biggest influences initially were the California Funk ceramics artists. Their irreverence helped me break out of my conservative Asian thinking mode. These clay artists said in their works that nothing was sacred, that we needed a fresh start and needed to examine everything. There was a sense that art could take a leadership role in this revolution."

He has also expressed admiration for the Pop Art movement, citing Andy Warhol as "my biggest influence, visually, historically, and stylistically".

Shimomura's paintings often take stereotypical American images of Asians: glowering, buck-toothed wartime "Japs", Fu Manchu, subservient geishas, martial artists, and skewer them through over-the-top exaggeration or juxtaposition with images of idealized American society. Pop culture icons such as Mickey Mouse, Coca-Cola, and Pikachu appear incongruously in bright, flat-perspective landscapes, sometimes with absurdly altered portraits of Shimomura himself. His more subtle works often combine traditional Japanese woodblock printing with impressions of the incarceration camps, taken from both his own youthful memories and passages from the diary that his grandmother Toku kept for many years.

While continuing to teach at the University of Kansas, Shimomura gradually became one of the most recognized artists in the United States, amassing awards and exhibition in many of the country's major museums and arts institutions. Since his retirement from teaching in 2004, he has continued painting, giving lectures, and exhibiting.

Text courtesy of Wikipedia, 2024