Been There, Got the T-Shirt

Lawrence-based artist Roger Shimomura has a habit of trolling Ebay for World War II-era postcards and advertisements that use stereotypical depictions of Japanese people. Over the years, he’s amassed quite a collection, and that’s partly what inspires Stereotypes and Admonitions. The show consists of 24 recent paintings, accompanied by Shimomura’s short stories detailing incidents of racism against Asian-Americans. Half of the works depict events that happened to Shimomura himself; the others deal with slights that made the national news. “I’ve been collecting these stories all my life,” says Shimomura, a third-generation Japanese-American.

Stereotypes oversimplify, overlook and reduce. Shimomura does the same thing visually with his comic-book style of painting, but he makes intelligent judgments about what’s most important for viewers to recognize in his images. Shimomura has used this style for years — he collected comic books as a child and was always attracted to their simultaneously overstated and simplified graphics.

In these paintings, Shimomura depicts himself and other minority people as he believes surrounding Caucasians see them. Sometimes Asians appear in traditional dress; elsewhere they look as if they’ve stepped out of propaganda posters, with yellow skin, slanted eyes and big teeth. Shimomura incorporates stereotypes of American Indians and Arab-Americans as well, portraying characters with crooked noses and turbans.

In “Abercrombie & Fitch,” two jolly, yellow-faced characters with slanted eyes and conical hats smile in front of a giant red circle that suggests a rising sun; one sports a long-sleeved T-shirt with an ad for “Wong Brothers Laundry.” The work is a response to clothing retailer Abercrombie & Fitch’s controversial introduction of a T-shirt line screen-printed with advertisements for fake Asian businesses. The derogatory images and phrases used to market such businesses took deep root in America’s collective consciousness. “I decided to do some of these national issues because I felt like that provided a larger context for these individual, personalized incidents that happened,” Shimomura explains.

Shimomura doesn’t discuss how he or others feel about the incidents. The victims’ emotional reactions are rarely a factor in the stories or paintings — their faces and bodies are too masked by stereotypical features to convey what they really think. In his stories, Shimomura occasionally describes his subjects as “disheartened,” an understatement considering that the paintings cover ground that’s offensive and downright disturbing.

For Kansas City viewers, Shimomura’s personal stories pack the added punch of local settings — these events seem more relevant and harder to separate from oneself because they happened on familiar streets.

“Not an Indian” tells the story of Shimomura’s attempt to apply for a store credit card at Weaver’s in downtown Lawrence in 1970. The store manager wouldn’t let him fill out an application because it was against store policy to issue cards to Indians, and Shimomura had no proof that he was not an Indian. In the painting, a yellow-skinned Japanese figure dressed in red-, black- and yellow-striped flowing fabrics — and wearing a headband with a feather around his red-painted scalp — holds a sword in one hand and an item of clothing (presumably the coat Shimomura had hoped to buy for his wife) in the other. Caucasian customers stand in the background, happily completing their purchases while the silhouette of what appears to be a policeman lurks behind them.

Perhaps the most personal piece in the show is the two-paneled “Yellow Rat Bastard.” Shimomura is the main character on the right; to the left is his former colleague at the University of Kansas, Norman Gee, a San Francisco-born Chinese-American. Each man is surrounded by a collage of family members as well as people and items associated with his ancestor’s country — a red Communist star and a panda for Gee, anime characters and a Zero bomber for Shimomura. “The defining moment in each painting is the fact that Norman is holding a pair of Chinese chopsticks with a long-grain kernel of rice, and I’m holding a pair of Japanese chopsticks with a short-grain kernel of rice,” Shimomura explains. “Chinese eat long-grain rice, and Japanese eat short-grain rice.” The piece was inspired by a LIFE magazine article from the 1940s titled “How to Tell the Difference Between the Chinese and the Japanese,” which listed facial features and physical characteristics as examples of differences.

Displayed on a pedestal between the two panels is a shopping bag printed with the words “yellow rat bastard” in bold black letters; a stuffed toy mouse pops out of the top. The title comes from a New York City clothing store named after the 1940s phrase for Japanese people. Shimomura says he was shocked when he first saw the store. In an effort to be ironic, he says, “I went in and bought one of their T-shirts and wore it to one of my openings.” When it came time to give a talk that night, the shirt helped him get his points across. “What’s even more interesting to me is that fact that a lot of Japanese tourists are in there buying clothes. These are young kids who have no kind of cultural memory about things like that. They come to this country without an awareness of what they were called or their parents were called during World War II.”

Shimomura, who is set to retire from his teaching position at KU in May, has spent 35 years exploring these issues. Compared to the coasts, however, the Asian presence in the Midwest is tiny; in Douglas County, where Shimomura lives, just 3,382 of 102,316 residents are of Asian descent. Stereotypes and Admonitions effectively and provocatively educates viewers about racism against this population in a vast region that might as well be called Caucasia.

“As I look back, I feel that I’ve had some success in my career. But to have based it upon one’s own identity as a Japanese-American living in the Midwest, I would’ve said years ago that there would be no way that that would be possible,” he says. “How is it that I’ve been able to get shows, win awards and all of these things while discussing something that is related to a virtually nonexistent percentage of the population of where I live? I’m not saying that that’s impressive. I’m saying that that’s kind of strange.”