Exhibition
Illusions of Harmony: Forgetting the Unnamable in Japanese and American History
Kalmanovitz Hall Atrium
Tuesday, April 24 to Tuesday, May 1

Lecture
Beyond Obsequious: Honor, Abjection, and Agency in Japanese American Visual Culture
Tuesday, April 24, 6:00pm
Maier Room in Fromm Hall
Reception to Follow in Kalmanovitz Hall (probably around 7:00-8:30pm)

This is the culminating event of a semester-long forum on “Citizenship in Japan and the US.”

How can art intervene in culturalist discourse to create space for a more diversely inclusive and activated notion of citizenship? This artist talk will pick up on ideas posed by preceding Davies Forum speakers—mechanisms for remembering and forgetting critical lessons of history (Lisa Yoneyama); and the dynamics of “polite racism” and notions of national belonging (Takashi Fujitani)—to discuss the artwork in the Davies exhibition and the influences that inspired it.  Tsuchitani will share his own inquiry into issues of race and identity as they have played out in the arena of Japanese American visual representation during the course of his lifetime, along with the aesthetic strategies that he has employed to leverage this awareness into effective forms of cultural resistance, agency, and interventional change.

Click to view larger

More info:  The Davies Forum

Campus Map

How can art be a catalyst for social change? Join Bay Area artists in a fishbowl conversation on Friday, January 27, 7-9 p.m., Intersection for the Arts, 925 Mission, San Francisco. Free and open to the public.

Five Bay Area artists, scholars and activists whose careers cross several generations, disciplines and social concerns will present their projects and strategies for engaging the community. The conversation will then open to the audience. Moderated by artist and human rights activist, Richard Kamler, this fishbowl event, “Four Decades of Art Activism,” will include:

Tom Ferentz (Photographer, Founder, Sixth Street Photography Workshop)

Judith Selby Lang (Eco-artist, Beach Plastic project)

Peter Selz (Founding Director, Berkeley Art Museum and Prof. Emeritus, Art History, UC Berkeley)

Scott Tsuchitani (Interdisciplinary artist, SF Asian Art Museum interventions)

Richard Kamler, moderator, is best known for his art addressing the US penal system, including “Table of Voices,” a sound installation giving voice to both victims and perpetrators, that was instrumental in developing a victim/offender reconciliation program at the San Francisco County Jail. Recently, he collaborated with international artists and the United Nations to create “Seeing Peace.”

Tom Ferentz founded Sixth Street Photography Workshop in 1991, an innovative program that shares the art and skills of photography with adults living in poverty.

Through the Plastic Project, multimedia artist Judith Selby Lang, explores the global impact of detritus and the unfathomable depths of the ocean to raise a deeper concern with the problem of plastic pollution in our seas.

Peter Selz, art historian and former curator of Painting and Sculpture at MoMA in New York, is the author of among other things, The Art of Engagement: Visual Politics in California and Beyond (2005).

Scott Tsuchitani is an interdisciplinary visual artist and documentary filmmaker whose controversial interventions into the Asian Art Museum’s cultural practices have questioned the ways in which stereotypes are used to draw audiences to the museum. He will be presenting this spring at USF’s Davies Forum on Nation, Citizenship and Identities in the U.S. and Japan.

Join these dynamic arts activists to discuss real examples of how art can make the world a better place.

This is the first of a series of events as part of the Richard Kamler Retrospective at USF’s Thacher Gallery, “celebrating four decades of socially engaged art.”

New Book

Just published this week, The Routledge Companion to Museum Ethics: Redefining Ethics for the Twenty-First Century Museum, edited by Janet Marstine, details my “Asians Art Museum” (Lord It’s the Samurai) project, in a chapter on “Museum Censorship” by Christopher Steiner.

From the publisher, about the book:

It argues for a museum ethics discourse defined by social responsibility, radical transparency and shared guardianship of heritage. And it demonstrates the moral agency of museums: the concept that museum ethics is more than the personal and professional ethics of individuals and concerns the capacity of institutions to generate self-reflective and activist practice.”

As for my work, Steiner asserts, ‘ . . .the intervention was a productive contribution that enhanced the exhibition narrative’.

More at the Asians Art Museum blog.

In Japan

Earlier this year I was interviewed by Megumi Kitahara, professor of Japanese Studies at the Graduate School of Osaka University, for the 63rd installment of her ongoing serial essay on “Art Activism” in インパクション (Impaction) magazine.  At 14 pages in length, it’s by far the most in-depth interview I’ve ever given.

北原恵.  アート・アクティヴィズム(63), Impaction [178], 106-119, 2011.

For those who read Japanese, here’s a link to Prof. Kitahara’s academic publications on CiNii.

This is actually the second interview I’ve had published in Japan.  The first was by Yumiko Murakami for her book アジア系アメリカ人  中公新書 : アメリカの新しい顔  (Ajiakei Amerikajin: Amerika no atarashii kao) (Asian Americans: New Faces of America), reportedly the first book published in Japan on the subject of Asian Americans (Tokyo: Chūō Kōronsha, pp. 211-214, 1997).  She interviewed me about my experience producing the documentary Meeting at Tule Lake for the Tule Lake Pilgrimage.

Teaching Geisha

Like my samurai project above, my Sansei Geisha project has also influenced academic discourse.  I only recently came across the following, from May of last year:

Jan Bardsley. Teaching Geisha in History, Fiction, and Fantasy (PDF), ASIANetwork Exchange, Vol. 17, No. 2 (Spring 2010 Issue)

Jan Bardsley is a professor of Japanese Humanities at University of North Carolina, interested in feminism and popular culture in Japan, who has written about my work previously:

Liza Dalby’s Geisha: the view twenty-five years later, Southeast Review of Asian Studies, Vol. 31 (Annual 2009), pp.309-323.

As the crisis continues to unfold, the one thing that is clear among all the uncertainty is that Japan is facing a long and difficult recovery.

Please join me and others in the art community as we use our art to help those who are suffering, in an art benefit for the relief effort in Japan.  We need your help!

Opening Reception

Thursday, April 28th 5-8pm

Mina Dresden Gallery

312 Valencia Street, San Francisco, CA 94103

www.bayareaartistsforjapan.org

Food and Drink donated by the famous local Japanese restaurant, Nombe, and others.

Gallery Hours:  Friday, April 29 & Saturday, April 30,11:00am -5:00 pm.

100% of the art sales will be donated to Japan Red Cross Society.

Thank you very much!

Scott

I had been wanting to come up with a visual way to connect the thematic content of my Perpetual FOREIGNER t-shirt with the current wave of xenophobia that’s manifesting across the country as legislation in states like Arizona (legalizing racial profiling) and Oklahoma (banning Muslim religious law).

Inspiration for this project came to me in the form of song titles: “By the Time I get to Phoenix (I’ll be profiled)“, and “I Fought (Sharia) Law, but the Law won,” based on familiar tunes, a couple cover versions playable here: (click to listen)

By the Time I Get to Phoenix, by Glen Cambell

I Fought The Law, The Clash

Since I had already packaged the t-shirts using an LP motif to play off of the 70′s rock reference in the t-shirt title, the idea came to turn the song titles into one of those stickers that were applied to shrink-wrapped LPs to advertise hit singles and the like.  A few hand-me-down examples pulled off the shelf:

I wanted to take it a step further in connoting LP by referring to the actual label on the record itself, and mix that up with the above.

Next step:  research past label designs.  I chose this one for simplicity, legibility and contemporaneity with the band.

And got to work.

First version: basic idea, needs logo

First logo try: tea kettle, too much the pot calling the kettle black

Teapot logo?

Tea cup?

It turns out the official Tea Party doesn’t have very fun iconography to appropriate.  Settled on tea bag.

The purple “tea” in the bag is modeled after the mountain majesty of Mt. Whitney in this photo of Manzanar Relocation Center taken by Dorothea Lange.

Photograph of Dust Storm at Manzanar War Relocation Authority Center, 07/03/1942

Needed more: movement and content

Enrich the content: the State Flag of Arizona

This reminded me of . . .

. . . the legendary Sun Record label, which led to . . .

this lettering, which also created space for "stereo" "typed." Still needed something more . . .

I recalled seeing these signs when I was attending grad school down at UC San Diego

A Navajo graphic artist working for Cal Trans in San Diego named John Hood designed it to prevent highway crossing deaths of border crossers.  Hood’s graphic has taken on a life of its own on both sides of the fight over immigration.  Dare I as well?

Target practice

Close to final choices (click to enlarge). The guard tower is from Manzanar; too busy and phallo-iconic for this purpose. Same goes for the towers from Guantanamo I tried.

Deadline-induced sleep deprivation can lead to things like these . . .

Details that never made it: voter approved... xenophobic... scapegoat

(The Scape goat appropriates the coat of arms of Lublin, a city in Poland.)

As the deadline of the sfmoma Member Preview rapidly closed in, time and technical constraints (inkjet printer bleed) forced me to simplify down to essentials, just in time.

Here’s how it ended up.

Final version.

The printed version, removable for creative re-use . . .

" • • • • ", intaglio etching (soft-ground drawing + aquatint), 6 x6 in.

On view this weekend and next:
Fort Mason Printmakers Holiday Print Sale
Opening: Fri. Dec 3, 6-9pm
Sat & Sun Dec 4 & 5, 11am-5pm
Ft. Mason Art Center, Bldg. B, Rm 101
Laguna & Marina Blvd, SF 94123

Holiday Studio Sale – 1890 Bryant St. Studios, #311
Sat Dec 11, noon to 6pm
1890 Bryant St @ Mariposa
Studio 311, SF 94110

Playing on the '70s rock band theme: LP-style packaging

T-shirts folded around actual LP covers

with "evacuation tags" for "authenticity"

. . . based on a scan of an actual internee tag . . .

. . . a little branding on reverse . . .

tied to shirt via "Intergration Rockstar" pin.

Album covers and Intergration Rockstar pins are from SCRAP (Scrounger’s Center for Reusable Art Parts).  Not all t-shirts contain LP covers (although one does contain an actual LP record!); some are wrapped around shrink-wrapped New Age calendars from 2004, etc., basically whatever was available to fit.

And no hit album would be complete without a (removable!) sticker!

[The story behind the sticker here.]

Voila! T-shirt as LP record.

Perpetual FOREIGNER t-shirt on display at San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, as part of Stephanie Syjuco‘s Shadowshop project, ongoing through May 1, 2011.

Exhibition Dates: October 6th – 21th
Gallery Hours: Wednesdays through Saturdays, 2pm – 6pm (or by appointment)

“Root Division presents a chance to see what all the Auction fuss is about. Come see the art we’ll be auctioning off at the event on October 21st, including work by over 135 established and emerging local artists. The Opening Reception is free to attend and almost as fun as the ticketed event. In case you’d rather not have to bid against your best friend for your favorite piece of art, everything will be available for purchase during the Opening at 110% of the retail price.”

Tickets for the Auction on October 21, 2010 can be purchased via website here, phone, or in person.

For a list of participating artists and more, visit www.rootdivision.org

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And elsewhere, 

Ongoing Exhibition:

Figuratively
USF Law School’s Rotunda Gallery
2130 Fulton Street (@ Parker), 94117

From August 13 into December
Mon-Fri, 9am∼5pm

Upcoming at SFMOMA:

Stephanie Syjuco’s Shadowshop

23 artists from 9 states . . .  just a small sampling below . . .

July 7 – 27, 2010

"Pilgrims" by Crisanta de Guzman (click for more)

Some of my work in the Borders show (click for show info)

Kit Yi Wong's dress made of facemasks (2010)

Kit Yi Wong’s bio mentions that “she is interested in how the body occupies the space between cultures, and is obsessed with the encounter of the mysterious and unknown.”

Detail of dress (worn in "I wear facemasks" performance)

USA-USA-USA #2 by Scott Polach (2010). Click to see more of his art.

From Scott Polach’s project statement:

“USA-USA-USA #2 was an uncommissioned work constructed along the route of the Presidio Habitats exhibit.  It was installed on June 14th, 2010.  On June 27th I discovered that most of the piece had been deinstalled by unknown persons, likely park management or a representative of Presidio Habitats.”

"Exit" by Ian Treasure (click for more)