Come up with 5 essential questions you can ask about identity in light of your artist's work and 5 key concepts about identity that are implicated by the questions.

Essential Questions:

1. How does being a minority (even in a culture that claims to be "accepting" of all) shape identity?
2. How does an individual deal with racist events/people/situations that occur beyond their control?
3. How can an individual take these events and turn them into art to make change?
4. How do these situations/events/people shape our identity?
5. Can an artist create pieces like this but also make pieces that pridefully show their heritage/culture/ identity as an Asian American? Or is it just one or the other?


Key Concepts:

1.Clearly other people's actions will affect someone's identity no matter where the person lives, or how they feel about themselves/want to be affected by others.
2. Situations or people like this cannot hold a person back from living open, freely and proudly of who they are. Take what occurs around you (especailly stuff one cannot control) and make art in defiance of it. Allow your true identity to show above it all.
3. Here, we see the artist using the racist imagery in order to lessen the sting when it comes from other people. In other words, they are using it themselves to diffuse the effects it has when others use it, which will eventually make what other people say completely meaningless.
4. When dealing with issues of race and racism it is clear that a person can either stand proud against those struggles or become ashamed of who they are.
5. This is one I just don't have an answer for. But maybe, creating pieces like this is also showing pride in the artist's identity as well just because of what he's trying to do with them.

Roger Shimomura - Artist dealing with Identity

 

Roger Shimomura is an American artist and retired professor whose work explores ideas of Asian American sociopolitical issues through the usage of racist imagery. He paints racists incidents from the point of view of the racists themselves. Shimomura has said that one of his earliest memories comes from when he was 5 years old and him and his family were placed inside a concentration camp built in the US to detain Japanese-Americans during World War II. He has said that he will always remember watching his parents try to put their lives back together after the war was over. The issues around his artwork come from these racist events that happened in our country and how Asian Americans coped with acts of blatant racism, that even still occurs today. Shimomura deals with these issues that ultimately lead to issues of identity that stem from being an Asian America, especially during the time of WWII.

"It's the kind of material his parents' generation shunned, but Shimomura agrees with African American painter Kara Walker, who uses racist stereotypes in her work in order to defuse them"

-artsjournal.com