Nationality Japanese Name Yoshiko Shimada | Role Artist Education Scripps College | |
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Born 1959 Tachikawa, Japan Notable work Shooting Lesson (1992), Tied to Apron Strings (1993), Bones in Tansu: Family Secrets (2004), Becoming a Statue of a Japanese Comfort Woman (2012) | ||
"Against Forgetting"
Yoshiko Shimada (嶋田 美子, Shimada Yoshiko, born 1959) is a Japanese video artist and performance artist who has been called "Japan’s premier feminist and antiwar artist."
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Biography
Shimada was born and raised in the Tachikawa section of western Tokyo, which, as the site of a US air force base, gave her early exposure to US-Japan postwar tensions during the 1960s. She graduated with a BA in Humanities from Scripps College in 1982 and received a PhD from Kingston University, London, in 2015.
Among the themes she explores are cultural memory and the role of women in World War 2 as both aggressors and victims. Her 1992 etching Shooting Lesson, for example, juxtaposes portraits of four Korean comfort women with a photograph of the wives of Japanese military police stationed in Korea receiving shooting lessons for self-protection against the local population. In her 1993 installation Tied to Apron Strings, she uses white aprons as both a symbol of domesticity and motherhood and as a reminder of the uniform of the Dai Nippon Fujinkai, a women's patriotic organization of World War 2 Japan. Shimada's interactive installation Bones in Tansu: Family Secrets, in which she solicited the war memories of museum visitors and incorporated them into the exhibit, first appeared in Tokyo in 2004 and then in seven other locations around the world. She performed Becoming a Statue of a Japanese Comfort Woman outside the Japanese embassy in London in 2012.
Shimada's works are held by the New York Public Library, Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography, Keio University Art Center, Kyoto Seika University, and City University of New York. She has had solo exhibitions in Japan, Hong Kong, the Philippines, Canada, and the United States, and her work was included in the 2002 Gwangju Biennale in South Korea.Shimada curated the Bigakkō portion of the Anti-Academy exhibit at the John Hansard Gallery in 2013-14.
Shimada has been included in the Asian American Arts Centre's digital archive.