paintings and photocollages exploring the racial injustices and politically hostile climate against Asians and Asian Americans in the US, from a uniquely Japanese American perspective
It is with a defiant heart that I make collages and paintings from acrylic paint, water soluble ink, graphite, and photographic inkjet printouts. In my work, I tackle topics such as immigration, assimilation, identity and transnationalism. References to historical events are important to fight the marginalization of the Asian American narratives in education. Although I was born in Iwakuni City in Japan, where the US Marine base is located, I moved to the midwestern US in grade school and have been living there for more than two decades. Japan is a well-known case as the first Asian country to westernize and to defeat a western power in a war (i.e., Russo-Japanese war). The self-inflicted psychological scars left by the modernization efforts can be seen even today, with Japanese anime depicting Japanese and Northeast Asians with white-inspired features, such as pointy nose, colored eyes, and blonde hair (i.e., Sailor Moon). Within the context of this impossible, racialized standard of beauty, I criticize the bind that Asian Americans find themselves in, as we are hit with both Asian stereotypes online (and in the real world) and whitewashed depictions as found in Japanese anime. I utilize sarcasm, exaggeration, and irony in my collage and mixed media works to highlight the falseness of the racist narratives. On a final note, my work is a product of the internet culture, which has dissolved traditional cultural and racial boundaries, allowing for appropriation and hybridity. There is no more source of originality in this era of globalization. It only makes sense for me to collage and paste onto my works the various images that I find on the internet, to further reflect upon the never-ending and cyclically evolving cross-referencing that manifests in the social media and the digital world. Many of my works can be categorized as internet art because they are conceived as digital collage and are also available as non-fungible tokens (NFT).