Bruce and Norman Yonemoto at the Japanese American National Museum, Los Angeles

Bruce And Norman Yonemoto: 
Memory, Matter And Modern Romance
Japanese American National Museum, Los Angeles
January 23, 1999 - ...

In recognition of the importance of visual art in the Japanese American community, the mid-career survey Bruce and Norman Yonemoto: Memory, Matter and Modern Romance opens at the Japanese American National Museum on January 23, 1999. Since 1976, the Yonemotos have created an extensive body of film, single-channel video, video installations, and objects that explore the complex creation of meaning and identity through film and media representation. The exhibition, which presents the most comprehensive treatment of the Yonemotos’ work as well as a new site-specific installation for the Hirasaki Gallery in the Museum’s Historic building, opens simultaneously with the unveiling of the Museum’s new 85,000 square-foot Pavilion and remains on view until July 4, 1999. The exhibition is initiated and sponsored by Fellows of Contemporary Art.

Curated by the Japanese American National Museum’s art curator Karin Higa, the exhibition is a comprehensive examination of the Yonemotos’ significant careers, and will be on view in three exhibition gallery spaces at the Japanese American National Museum. President and Executive Director Irene Hirano says: “The Museum is proud to present artists whose work reflects the diverse and varied interpretations of the Japanese American experience. The Japanese American National Museum recognizes the central role that creativity and artistic interpretation play in defining what we know as culture.”

Included in the exhibition is the new site-specific commissioned installation, Silicon Valley, which combines film and television footage projected onto a large white screen. Having grown up in the Santa Clara Valley just before the massive technological expansion turned it into “Silicon Valley,” the Yonemotos use their experience to create another interpretation of the Cold War icon of total destruction. Bruce and Norman Yonemoto recall changes that came to their “Valley of The Heart’s Delight” as a result of the technological boom in the 1960s and 1970s: “We watched as all the fruit trees were pulled out of the ground and burned to make way for tract homes and shopping malls. We, like many others, can’t go home again. It is gone as if a bomb had blasted it all away.” Viewers of the installation will see images of an exploding atom bomb, scenes from Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove, and the infamous 1964 presidential campaign commercial “Daisy Girl” that together create a “personal representation of the annihilation of our ‘Valley of The Heart’s Delight’ to make room for today’s Silicon Valley.”

Also included in the exhibition is Framed (1989), an installation which incorporates video and slide projection to re-examine film produced by the War Relocation Authority (the WRA, the federal agency that oversaw the forced unconstitutional incarceration of more than 120,000 Americans of Japanese ancestry during World War II) in the U.S concentration camps. The Yonemotos reframed aspects of the footage which originally tried to put a smiling face on a grim episode in American history. The resulting stills have a poignancy and irony missing from the original film.

In addition to video projection installations, Bruce and Norman Yonemoto: Memory, Matter and Modern Romance will screen selections from the Yonemoto’s single-channel videos and films. There are five video-projected programs which will feature ten works by the Yonemotos, including: Made In Hollywood (1990) featuring Patricia Arquette and Ron Vawter; Green Card: An American Romance (1982); and Kappa (1986), a collaborative effort with Mike Kelley that inserts Kappa (the malevolent Shinto god of fresh water) into the Oedipus myth played out in postmodern L.A.

Background of the Artists

Norman Yonemoto was born in Chicago, Illinois in 1946. One year earlier, his father Tak, who was in the Army, married his mother Rosie who was incarcerated in the Tule Lake, California concentration camp. Eventually the Yonemotos returned to California, where Bruce was born in 1949 in San Jose.

Norman moved from the Bay Area to Los Angeles in 1968, where he attended UCLA before concentrating his studies at the American Film Institute Center for Advanced Studies. Bruce received a Bachelor’s degree from the University of California, Berkeley in 1972. The following year he went to Japan where he lived for three years while studying at the Sokei Bijitsu Gakko (Sokei Art Institute) in Tokyo, Japan. After returning in 1975, Bruce went on to earn a Master of Fine Arts from the Otis Art Institute in Los Angeles.

In 1976, Norman and Bruce embarked on their first collaborative work, an ambitious film project entitled Garage Sale (please see attached calender for screening date and place). In 1979 the Yonemotos formalized their partnership with the founding of their own company, Kyo-dai Productions. Captivated by what was then a relatively new artistic medium, the Yonemotos went on to work in video, where they played a central role in its establishment as a viable artistic medium.

The Museum’s curator of art, Karin Higa, says of the Yonemoto’s background, “Like many Japanese Americans, their reintegration into postwar life was characterized by the assimilation to the new American ideal as depicted on television, and much of their work examines the role of the media in our lives and questions the subtle power of Hollywood on the formation of identity.”

The Yonemotos’ work has been in numerous exhibitions at major institutions such as the Long Beach Museum of Art; the Santa Monica Museum of Art; the Wexner Center for the Arts, Colombus, Ohio; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; and the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Their films have been screened at the American Film Institute, Los Angeles; The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Anthology Film Archives, New York; Pacific Film Archives, Berkeley, California; Kunstverein, Cologne; and the Hara Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo. Among their distinctions are inclusion in the last Whitney Biennial and the permanent collection of The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Bruce and Norman Yonemoto are also recipients of several National Endowment for the Arts grants and the 1993 Maya Deren Award for Independent Film and Video Artists.

Publications

All Museum visitors will receive a free, sixteen-page brochure with descriptions of all exhibition pieces and installations. A translation of the brochure is available in Japanese and Spanish, as well as large typeface editions. A 104-page fully illustrated catalogue, which includes essays by curator Karin Higa, writer Timothy Martin and writer Ian Buruma is also available for purchase. For the first time ever, the Yonemotos’ entire collection of films and single-channel videos will be available on VHS format for viewing in the National Resource Center, located on the first floor of the Japanese American National Museum’s Pavilion.

Sponsorship: The exhibition has received key support from the AT+T Foundation, The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, the Peter Norton Family Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, The California Arts Council and the Japanese American National Museum.

Japanese American National Museum
www.janm.org