What Are You, Yellow?

The painting, from 2008, is called Yellow Terror. It is
covered—covered—in Japs. Bloodthirsty Japs laughing
maniacally, slanting their slanty eyes all the way closed, with fangs
on their buckteeth. Waving, slaphappy kamikaze Japs in cockpits. Japs
with elephant ears for spying. As wily snakes. Rats in traps. Dogs
wearing the epaulets of generals, pig rank-and-files, hairy-palmed
apes. They form a vortex at the center of which is the face of the
painter himself—Roger Shimomura, familiar from his many other
self-portraits—pulling his eyes up into slants with his index
fingers (which, even when you deduce they’re index fingers, still read
as middle fingers), biting his bottom lip to form buckteeth, and
implying one unmistakable sarcastic sentiment: Ohhhhh. So
solly.

Direct references for this painting are right next to it: World War
II posters and postcards of the evil enemy in precisely these
yellow-faced forms put out by the American propaganda machine, which
included not only government agencies but also corporations (Seagram’s,
for instance) and such artists as one Dr. Seuss. In the painting,
Shimomura inverts the bull’s-eye, turning a target into a fuck-you
surprise counterattack. But the original attack is also on display here
in Shimomura’s exhibition at the Wing Luke Asian Museum: a
mass-produced WWII-era dartboard that reads “BOM JAP” offers 100 points
(the highest reward, with others including 25 points for a kamikaze
pilot) for nailing the bucktoothed, slanty-eyed bull’s-eye. If that
weren’t enough, there’s also a tidy display case containing Japanese
hunting licenses, issued by barbershops and store owners and whoever
wanted to do the issuing back in the days after Pearl Harbor.

This is to certify that _________ IS ENTITLED TO HUNT THE JAPANESE
RAT, and is hereby warned to exercise extreme caution in approaching
this savage beast: it is a vicious animal and strikes from behind
without warning. This animal has the characteristics of a skunk in
appearance and odor but has an appetite for women and children instead
of small fowls… In shooting this stinkin skunk, aim at its stomach,
since it has lots of GUTS, but no heart or brains.

Shimomura personally owns the hunting licenses, the dartboard, and
the propaganda cartoons—or he did, until now. He bought them and
hundreds of other insanely racist objects on eBay (the best search
terms to use remain “Jap” and “Chinaman”—you may as well use both
even if you only want Japanese-targeted racism, since telling the
difference is so confusing for a genuine racist), and he’s giving his
collection to the Wing Luke, in his native Seattle, where he grew up in
the Central District and then on Beacon Hill, and from where the three
generations of his family (he was an infant, third-generation) were
deported to an internment camp in Hunt, Idaho, from 1942 to 1944.
(Shimomura—whose sister, Carolyn, died in the camp—has
lived in Kansas most of his adult life, but he has shown continuously
at Greg Kucera Gallery in Seattle for almost 25 years. His other main
collection, of internment diaries and objects, will go to the
Smithsonian National Museum of American History in Washington,
D.C.)

Yellow Terror is the title of the 2008 painting and also the
title of this exhibition, which pairs an inordinate number of
paintings—there are 34—with Shimomura’s collection of
terrible objects. The clash is intense. A beautiful, glowing case has
been fashioned for dozens of pairs of hateful Halloween masks dating
back to the 1930s but also as recent as a few years ago, for instance.
But back to Yellow Terror, because it encapsulates so much of
how Shimomura puts his ideas at stake.

The way Kara Walker draws on the antebellum folk tradition of
silhouettes, Shimomura rests his work on an Americanist bedrock:
postwar painting. The painting Yellow Terror picks up precisely
where the recent Seattle Art Museum megashow Target
Practice—about the postwar attacks on painting—left
off. The thick swarm of appropriated cartoon Japs resembles Jackson
Pollock’s “all-over” composition, heralded as the avant-garde
breakthrough of its day, as well as Jasper Johns’s response to that
overheated style: his cold, dead-eyed Pop targets. Just as Johns
pronounced Pollock DOA, so Shimomura injects poison into the veins of
Pop. The forms of Roy Lichtenstein and Johns are Shimomura’s source,
but they have developed rigor mortis. It’s the American ideal of
equality, Shimomura’s super-fun cartoony paintings remind you, that is
dead on arrival for certain Americans.

But Shimomura’s antiracist project has an added layer: He wants to
reveal that Asian racism is a minority within minorities, that Asian
stereotypes are still seen as more acceptable than, say, stereotypes
about African Americans. He does a pretty convincing job of
it—and this is how he implicates the contemporary viewer—in
Yellow Terror. It’s not just that Theodor Geisel (Dr. Seuss)
drew a Jap (“Jap” being the very essence of and shorthand for this
stereotype) back in 1940-whatever. That drawing became the centerpiece
of a commemorative envelope less than 10 years ago after a book
of Geisel’s war drawings was released, and the envelope on display here
bears an astounding 2004 postmark (it was sent from La Jolla,
California).

Shimomura has continually taken aim, as seen in paintings and
objects here, at the reinventions of the old, painful stereotypes: the
early 2000s internet cartoon sensation Mr. Wong, a bucktoothed butler
for a white woman; the 2002 line of hilarious fortune-cookie-laundry-service-etc.-etc. shirts by the fratty retailer
Abercrombie & Fitch. (Shimomura has a deliciously vicious large
vertical painting called Frat Rats that predates the A&F
attitude—which basically boils down to God, why can’t you
Asians get a sense of humor?—but responds to the sentiment
with perfect derision.) One of Shimomura’s funniest paintings (not in
this show) is his depiction of the xenophobic right-wing commentator
Michelle Malkin, a Filipino American who wrote a book defending the
U.S. decision to intern its own citizens, jabbering away from inside an
internment barrack window. It’s called Keep on Talkin’, Michelle
Malkin. Recently, Shimomura has begun work on a series of paintings
of himself fighting everyone he has issues with—flying through
the air like a kung-fu hero, for example, to kick Ann Coulter in the
back of the head. He’s calling it “Settling the Score.”

Shimomura gets plenty of criticism for what he does. Older Asian
Americans tell him to stop bringing it back up. Younger ones—his
three kids, even—don’t get the references. First-generation Asian
immigrants wonder why he doesn’t loosen up. It’s a generational thing,
he said, walking through Yellow Terror before it opened. He
spoke of a recent dinner with Betye Saar, the older African-American
artist who sees a world of difference between her 1970s works
incorporating racist mammy dolls and Walker’s racist
silhouettes—and who hasn’t hesitated to criticize the younger
artist. Shimomura, who is soon giving a lecture at the University of
Texas at the invitation of Michael Ray Charles, an African-American
artist who uses Sambos and pickaninnies in his work, said he wishes he
could get away with what Walker does. Is there anything he wouldn’t
paint, any place he would, like Saar, draw the line? “No,” he says
flatly.

In a phone conversation after the opening last week, Shimomura
considered what his own children think of his work, then said he
frankly doesn’t know. His grandmother would be embarrassed, he says;
his father and mother would check out the price tags and, seeing that
the paintings are selling, would approve. But there is a
late-in-the-day quality to Shimomura’s project. “I feel like what I’m
doing is stamping out flash fires left over from forest fires,” he
says, which captures it. Paradoxically, he’s made art that he hopes
will lose its power. The best he can hope for is that his paintings
start to feel dated. They don’t yet.