Bruce and Norman Yonemoto

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Bruce Yonemoto and Norman Yonemoto are two Los Angeles, CA - based video/installation artists of Japanese American heritage.

Bruce and Norman Yonemoto’s family was among the 120,000 incarcerated Japanese Americans during World War II. Their mother, Fumiko Rosie Hitomi, was placed with her family at Tule Lake in Northern California. Their father, Tak Yomemoto, had been drafted into the United States Army. When Rosie’s uncle was brutally murdered in the internment camp, Tak sent condolences and rekindled the relationship. Soon after, Rosie was given permission to marry Tak and leave the camp. She was then allowed to relocate to Chicago. Norman Yonemoto was born in 1946 in Chicago. Once the war ended and Japanese Americans were released, the family relocated to Northern California. Bruce Yonemoto was born in 1949 in San Jose.

Growing up in the 1950s, the two brothers were actively a part of the post-war idealism and the culture of movies and television shows. 8mm home movies, projection screens, and television sets became a part of everyday life. [1]

Norman Yonemoto’s training was in film. After Santa Clara University, University of California, Berkeley and UCLA; Norman attended the American Film Institute for two years where he earned his MFA in 1972. Bruce Yonemoto, however, sought his training in the visual arts. After UC Berkeley, he went to Tokyo studying at the Sokei Bijitsu Gakkō. Once he returned to California, he obtained his Masters in Fine Arts at Otis Art Institute. He is currently the chair and professor of the Art Department at the University of California, Irvine.

Both brothers utilize Los Angeles as tool and backdrop for a number of projects, drawing particularly from the Hollywood veneer of glamour and romance. Since 1976, the brothers have collaborated on numerous films, single-channel videos and video installations. Their first collaboration, Garage Sale (1976), was a 16mm feature film about a young blond man named Hero and his wife drag queen Goldie Glitters. As Goldie demands a divorce, Hero, in a frenzy to retain her love, encounters numerous characters – each with their own idiosyncrasies and their own definitions for success. The actress who plays Goldie was actually drag-queen Goldie Glitters, Santa Monica City College’s 1975 Homecoming Queen. Though it is made obvious to the audience that Goldie is actually a man, the line between reality and fiction is blurred when Goldie is sympathetically portrayed as a woman tapping into recognizable fantasies imbued into contemporary culture through fictional Hollywood romances and unrealistic dreams. [2]

Similar themes, clashing idea, and the juxtaposition and confusion of reality with fiction echo through their subsequent projects which assemble raw materials from their post-WWII youth and home videos with recognizable Hollywood and Industry inspired scenes, dialogues, and romances. [3]

Their projects confront the collision of cultures, ethnicities, and sexuality by alluding to and referencing the Japanese American internment, their own Japanese heritage, Norman’s homosexuality, their post-war ‘Americanization,’ Hollywood, and commercialism. Some of their projects include: Based on Romance (1979); An Impotent Metaphor (1979), Green Card: An American Romance (1982); Vault (1984); Kappa (1986) and Made In Hollywood (1990), videos that explore the space between the romantic fantasies of Hollywood and the reality of human psycho-sexual relationships. Their recent works include a 1993 collaboration with John Baldessari for the Santa Monica Museum of Art entitled Three Locations/Three Points of View, A Matter of Memory (1995) and Silicon Valley (1999). As a contributor to the field of film and video, the Yonemoto brothers often utilized the language and imagery of film to expose and subvert the powers of racist propaganda, of film. [4] A Matter of Memory considers the act of memory and the reconstruction of lost or faded memory. [5]

The latter collaborations have almost all been commissioned by museums and utilize specific gallery spaces to affect the viewer experience, often collaborating color, still and moving images, sound, and movement to challenge the viewer.

The Yonemoto brothers have received numerous awards including the 1993 Maya Deren Award for Experimental Film and video; the Rockefeller Foundation Intercultural Film/Video/Multimedia Fellowship, the American Film Institute for Independent Film and Videomaker Grant, and the Atlanta Film and Video Festival for Best New Narrative.

Their work is in numerous permanent collections of Museums. Among them the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York; the Japanese American National Museum and the J Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, the Long Beach Museum of Art and the Hara Museum of Contemporary Art in Tokyo.

[edit] Bibliography

  • Chattopadhyay, Collette, “Matter and Memories: Memory, Matter, and Modern Romance.” Afterimage 27, no.3 (Nov. 1999).
  • Hallmark, Kara Kelley, Encyclopedia of Asian American Artists: Artists of the American Mosaic (Westport:Greenwood Press, 2007
  • Higa, Karin et al., Bruce and Norman Yonemoto: Memory, Matter, and Modern Romance (Los Angeles: Japanese American National Museum, 1999).
  • Higa, Karin, “Some Thoughts on National and Cultural Identity: Art by Contemporary Japanese American Artists,” (Artist’s Pages.) Art Journal 55 (Fall 1996).
  • Leah Ollman, "Bruce and Norman Yonemoto at the Japanese American National Museum- Japanese American National Museum, New York, New York - Brief Article", Art in America, Sept 1999, FindArticles.com, 27 October 2007, [1].

[edit] References

  1. ^ Higa, Karin et al., Bruce and Norman Yonemoto: Memory, Matter, and Modern Romance (Los Angeles: Japanese American National Museum, 1999), 16.
  2. ^ Higa, Karin et al., Bruce and Norman Yonemoto: Memory, Matter, and Modern Romance (Los Angeles: Japanese American National Museum, 1999), 18.
  3. ^ Hallmark, Kara Kelley, Encyclopedia of Asian American Artists: Artists of the American Mosaic (Westport: Greenwood Press, 2007), 252-3.
  4. ^ Higa, Karin, “Some Thoughts on National and Cultural Identity: Art by Contemporary Japanese American Artists.” (Artist’s Pages.) Art Journal 55 (Fall 1996): 7.
  5. ^ Chattopadhyay, Collette, “Matter and Memories: Memory, Matter, and Modern Romance.” Afterimage 27, no.3 (Nov. 1999):45.