Description

“To most non-Asians in this country, the differences between the Japanese, Chinese and other Asian people are either indistinguishable or immaterial. During World War II this insensitivity was expressed by their failure to recognize the differences between the Japanese people and Americans of Japanese descent. Today, history is being forced to admit the gravity of this error in judgment . . .

This series of prints explores America’s inability to distinguish between Japanese and Japanese American people. This is what brought about the internment camps for World War II. In the twelve images, different Japanese American people stand behind the barbed wire of the internment camps, while traditional Japanese figures such as costumed actors stand in front of the wire barrier.”

– Roger Shimomura –

The Yellow No Same series deals with the artist’s observations of a double-sided prejudice in American society in which all Asians are lumped into one, ethnically interchangeable group, while all Asian Americans are viewed as dissimilar from other Americans. Each of the images in this series contrast a male figure taken from Japanese woodblock prints with images of Japanese Americans in the Minidoka camp where Shimomura and his family were interned from 1942-1944. Separating the figures from each of these worlds are discrete lines of barbed wire silhouetted in black.