Artist Explores How His Two Worlds Collide

----------------------------------------------------------------- Shimomura on exhibit

"Roger Shimomura: Paintings," at Greg Kucera Gallery, 608 Second Ave., through June 30. Hours: Tuesdays through Saturdays, 10:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m., Sundays 1 to 5 p.m. -----------------------------------------------------------------

Roger Shimomura, one of the Seattle's art scene's most provocative native sons, is up to his usual tricks.

In a show of recent work now on display at Greg Kucera Gallery, Shimomura cloaks pointed commentary on Japanese and American stereotypes in paintings and prints that are pure pleasure.

In "Enter the Rice Cooker," a fierce-looking Samurai warrior clutches a modern electric rice cooker while gazing lustfully at the silhouette of a woman behind a screen.

The woman is Western. Her vampy red evening glove and the come-hither way she wields her compact and lipstick tell us that she's a Marilyn Monroe-style sexpot. He's macho, the stereotype of Japanese male virility and strength.

But the noble warrior is about ready to compromise his samurai dignity to have her. Already he's holding a rice cooker, signaling his willingness to be housebroken into a tame, domestic male in exchange for the ultimate Western prize - a Hollywood bombshell. All that separates them is a fragile, partly-opaque screen that prevents the pair from getting a close, more accurate, look at one another.

As more than one critic has pointed out, it's the shadow territory around the screen - the area that is neither Japanese nor American, that interests Shimomura. Shimomura is a Sansei, or third-generation Japanese American, and he has spent the last 25 or so years of his life exploring on canvas the ironies of being Japanese American in a culture that prefers to shoehorn people into more easily defined categories.

"All these paintings deal with architecture, the brick walls being metaphors for European-American culture," said Shimomura, who was in town recently for the opening. Though he grew up in Seattle and earned his undergraduate degree at the University of Washington, Shimomura since 1969 has lived in Lawrence, Kan., where is he an art professor at the University of Kansas. (He also has returned every summer for nearly two decades to spend time with family and friends, and to go salmon fishing.)

"That culture unifies us as Americans. We are educated that way. I don't know if its positive or negative, but it's the way it is," Shimomura said. "But encapsulated within those walls we all harbor other cultures. The shoji screen is about my other culture . . . Within that framework I've just described the meanings of all these paintings."

Though the show at Kucera's is not a large one - it's sharing the gallery with an exhibit of Jennifer Bartlett paintings - it's well worth seeing, especially as a warmup for what is starting to look like the year of Roger Shimomura.

In September, both the Bellevue Art Museum and the art gallery at Western Washington University are mounting shows of Shimomura's work. The show at Western promises to be especially insightful, because it is a traveling retrospective organized by the Spencer Museum of Art at the University of Kansas.

At 56, an age that's considered mid-career in the art world, Shimomura already has enjoyed signiicant success. His work has been shown regularly at galleries and museums around the country since the early '70s, and his paintings are included in the permanent collections of such museums as the National Museum of American Art in Washington, D.C.

In Seattle, his paintings are in the permanent collections of the Seattle Art Museum, Henry Art Gallery, Safeco Insurance Co. and Microsoft Corp. He also designed one of the murals in Metro's underground station at Westlake. The price of his acrylic paintings at Greg Kucera range from $2,000 to $6,000.

Besides his reputation as a painter, he's also known for his installation and performance art pieces, which, like his artwork, deal with the Japanese-American experience.

Trained as an undergraduate in commercial art, Shimomura spent several years as a graphic artist before doing graduate work in fine art at Syracuse University, where he earned a master's of fine arts degree in painting in 1969. For a while in the '60s he struggled to find his own aesthetic sense and style, pulled in several directions by his talent at graphic art, the abstract/expressionist training he'd had in fine arts classes at the UW and his growing interest in '60s pop art.

"I was winning awards for abstract drawings in art fairs in Anacortes and places, but I was also doing big paintings of TV dinners," said Shimomura. But a summer painting course at Stanford University in 1967 exposed him to work of such Bay Area figurative artists as Wayne Thiebaud and Richard Diebenkorn, and suddenly Shimomura found his style: figurative, flat and filled with cartoon colors.

It wasn't until the early '70s, however, that Shimomura found his subject matter. Though he'd had no interest in Asian art, an unintended racial insult from a Kansas farmer inspired to him buy a book on traditional Japanese woodblock prints. He was soon making paintings and prints that looked like big, dramatic Japanese prints, though always with an ironic, cross-cultural twist. A 1973 print of a scowling Kabuki actor, for instance, looks like the real thing, until you notice that his kimono is imprinted with dozens of irritating little yellow happy faces.

Shimomura quickly became a master mixer of cultural icons.

Over the years he's paired samurai heroes with Disney characters, giant pieces of sushi with gleaming Western kitchen appliances. One of his favorite subthemes is cross-cultural sexual politics. In his paintings samurais lust after Hollywood queens; demure-looking Japanese women in traditional apparel are the rewards for big, blond, Western hunks. Sometimes the couples end up in steamy scenes straight out of the tradition of Japanese erotic prints. It's no wonder that people often think of his work as humorous, light-hearted and happy.

But whether he's showing images of sexual desirability or intellectual achievement (one of the paintings at Kucera's is called "Model Minority" and juxtaposes a Japanese woman in a college graduation gown with an image of Marilyn Monroe), Shimomura's aim is to chip away at racial stereotypes.

Pairing Superman with a kimono-clad Japanese woman makes a clear statement. But his message isn't always so obvious.

One of his most powerful projects was a 1983 series called "Journey to Minidoka." It was based on the diaries kept by his grandmother, who along with Shimomura and his family was interned at a camp in Minidoka, Idaho, during World War II.

Painted in a style that carefully recreates the look of traditional Japanese woodblock prints, Shimomura created lovely portraits of his grandmother as a traditional-looking Japanese woman in what appears to be a Japanese house. Only the few inches of barbed wire in the background - and the quotes he lifted from her diaries - tell the viewer that these portraits are about her life at Minidoka. (None of these paintings is in the Kucera show; a few will be included in the shows later this year.)

The Minidoka series was popular with collectors. The paintings were aesthetically stunning, even serene. But because they were so visually appealing, many collectors didn't realize what they were about. Shimomura said few buyers asked to have his grandmother's diary entries sent along with the paintings. Once they noticed the barbed wire in the background, some would-be buyers asked him to paint it out. He refused.

"People's first reaction to my work is always purely aesthetic," said Shimomumra. "They say, `I love the color.' They like the playfulness. That's the main driving force for me, to present the paintings on that level. But there are also other layers there for those who want to look deeper."