Six Asian American Artists: Our Own Words

Once the shutter is released, the photographed event becomes historical.

How can one visualize moments that precede their lived experiences and memory?

Seventy-five years ago, 1500 US battleships fired 200,000 tons of bombs during 90 days of battle at Okinawa. While history is written by those with power; the landscape is an objective witness. 

Along the Banta cliffs, the land is marked by the sacrifices made by those who lost their lives there. Through the creation of historically loaded, hyper-real photographs, the viewer is affected by the sense of embodied and temporal vertigo that the large-scale immersive photographic prints inspire.  

—Osamu James Nakagawa

...when I got to Kansas for my first teaching job, all of a sudden, I was in foreign country. 

All of a sudden, I was Japanese again and people were asking me, "How did you come to speaking the language so well? Where are you from?" All of those clichéd responses that any Asian American would tell you happens to them anyplace off of the West Coast. That's when I did my first painting that looked Japanese. 

But at the same time, I saw it as another pop painting because the Japanese art that I knew about, or had seen, were all Japanese wood block prints, and those were very pop. It was just a stylistic step sideways really. 

— Roger Shimomura

When the horrific nature of war becomes normal, it takes on a surreal form. The series “Today’s Life and War” emerged from my experiences during the eight-year Iran-Iraq War. This conflict has had a strong symbolic influence on the emotional life of my generation. Although we may be safe within the walls of our homes, the war continues to reach us through newspapers, television, and the Internet.

This body of work represents war and its legacy, the ways in which it permeates all aspects of contemporary society. I capture moments that reference the ongoing duality of life and war without precluding hope. In a fictionalized battlefield, I show a couple in a series of everyday activities: eating breakfast, watching television, and celebrating their wedding. 

Though they do not visibly express emotion, the man and woman embody the power of perseverance, determination, and survival. 

— Gohar Dashti

It is a female figure projected in multiple silhouettes that are seen engaged in a self-destructive ritual. With a leash in her hand, one of the figures is riding on the back of the other as if to gain control, while aiming to pick and destroy the third at the tip of her sword. In this apparently violent and brutal narrative she seems to have conquered the art of balancing. 

It is a metaphor that there is no way of growth without having to go through destruction of the self. 

— Ambreen Butt