Side by Side: Nihonmachi Scenes by Tokita, Nomura, and Fujii
Wing Luke Museum, 719 South King Street. Open Wednesday to Sunday 10am-5pm. Runs till May 11, 2025.
Curated by the pioneering art historian Barbara Johns, this exhibition brings us three first generation (Issei) Japanese artists who were prominent as modernist painters of the American scene in the 1920s and 1930s and then taken into Japanese incarceration. They disappeared from art history until the amazing detective work and painstaking research by Barbara Johns brought them back.
Over the span of many years, Johns has located descendants, art works, and most exciting of all, wartime diaries. The exhibition includes both art and diaries, giving us an intimate look at day-to-day life in the camps, including the Puyallup temporary camp, before the move to Minidoka.
Most of us on the West Coast are now familiar with the fact that the Japanese were rounded up after the Pearl Harbor attack on December 7, 1941, and taken into camps. They lost all their possessions except two suitcases they could carry with them. But even before that, the Alien Land Law of 1921 declared Issei could not own, lease, or rent land. In 1924, the National Origins Act created a quota system that encouraged immigration from Northern Europe. Issei could not become citizens.
But the artists in this exhibition demonstrated that nothing deterred them. They had businesses and pursued painting, studying with various teachers. Takuichi Fujii was educated as a youth in Japan, then followed his father and brother to Seattle, although he was the only who stayed and made his own way. He had some training in sumi-e (ink painting, but his main training came in Seattle from various teachers and friends. He joined with Kamekichi Tokita and Kenjiro Nomura in a group called Shunjukai. The three, with other artists went on painting trips and as well as depicting the Nihonmachi district, the highly concentrated Japanese area in Seattle.
Tokita had the most education in Japan, but he mainly learned painting in Seattle, coming there in 1919, after deciding not to pursue his father’s tea business. Kenjiro Nomura came to Tacoma at the age of ten and was left on his own at the age of seventeen when his parents returned to Japan. He enterprisingly moved to Seattle two years later and became involved with the cultural community.
The exhibition focuses on two topics, the 1920s and 1930s paintings by all three artists, and the wartime experiences of incarceration seen in journals paintings and drawings.
The paintings are a prime example of the blending of modernist perspectives and American Scene painting, with a level of authenticity rarely seen in that era. Since the artists painted their immediate surroundings in urban Seattle, scenes we can still locate today, they were deeply connected to what they were depicting. The paintings rarely include figures, but the subtle browns, reds, and ochres of the buildings set off by sharp green patches of trees, and complex perspectives give us a view we can identify. My favorite is the 4th and Yesler series, by all three artists, they explore the intersection where the Yesler bridge crosses Fourth Ave using tricky intersecting angles that gives the scene dynamic energy.
When the incarceration order hit, Fujii immediately began a diary with drawings. This remarkable document, only recently discovered by Johns, gives brief comments and extraordinary drawings. Some of the journal appears in the exhibition, but there is far more in John’s excellent book, The Hope of Another Spring: Takuichi Fujii, Artist and Wartime Witness (University of Washington Press, 2017). Johns began her trio of books of these Issei artists with Signs of Home: The Paintings and Wartime Diary of Kamekichi Tokita (University of Washington Press, 2011). Finally, Kenjiro Nomura survived incarceration and restarted his career in the 1950s with the support of friends, creating impressive abstract paintings which are not included here but illustrated in John’s third book, Kenjiro Nomura, American Modernist (Cascadia Art Museum, 2021).
In these paintings, we clearly see the artists’ unique blend of modernism and Americanism, abruptly truncated by the incarceration. Survival of all three took different paths, but their art works and diaries have not been shown or discussed until the last few years, with Johns’ path-breaking work.
“Side by Side” gives us an intimate view of the three artists. The obstacles that they overcame throughout their lives make this rediscovery all the more important.
~Susan Platt, PhDwww.artandpoliticsnow.com
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