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Responding to Your Community Through HaikuRainier Valley HaikuRoger Shimomura's sculpture, "Rainier Valley Haiku", presents a brilliant and complex visual exploration of Japanese-American heritage as it moves through history. His sculpture presents a humorous and complex critique of what it means for a person of Japanese descent to study, work and live an American life; a simultaneous story of resistance and assimilation. His medium is metal and paint, but the sculpture mimics the form of a haiku. 
Roger Shimomura was commissioned by Sound Transit to create a Haiku assemblage sculpture for the Othello Station in the Rainier Valley Light Rail corridor, installed in June 2008. Photo © Roger Shimomura 2008. All rights reserved. Shimomura's art explores the issue of an individual's cultural identity in relationship to the dominant American culture, and the effects of racism from his personal perspective. Shimomura, a Japanese American artist, was born in Seattle during World War II. His earliest memories come from his experience living with his family in a Japanese internment camp in Idaho. Later, he received degrees in fine arts from the University of Washington and Syracuse University in New York. Shimomura's work explores and reflects back to the viewer his experiences with racism and encounters with the ideology of cultural superiority as a Japanese-American in post-war society. He makes use of a graphic style influenced by pop art, comics and his collection of American memorabilia found in thrift stores. Shimomura describes his work as,
...an aesthetic and political comparison between contemporary America and traditional Japan. Using images from both cultures, Shimomura creates a complicated layering of pictorial information and social observation. As his paintings and prints are interpreted and decoded by the viewer, Shimomura's tangled intentions are revealed in a subtly political way. |
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