Superman
I want to begin our conversation by asking for your thoughts about your self- portrait An American in Disguise, from 2012 (frontispiece), which I find particu- larly striking. It depicts you wearing a Superman costume under what appears to be a kimono.
RS: Even though it’s not one of the larger paintings in the exhibition, it summarizes a lot of the ideas that appear in all of the other work. One of the primary themes in this series has to do with the physical appearance that Asian people in this country have and how that affects how other people perceive them, rightly or wrongly. In this particular painting I’m wearing a kimono not because I have ever worn a kimono for any occasion, other than maybe a costume party, but because people in the majority think I should look this way. They look at me and say, “This person is an Asian.” Now, along with that go a lot of traits and habits and so on that have no basis in fact, which simply are not there for people like myself who have been in this country for three generations or, for my children, four been in this country for three generations or, for my children, four generations. They are no more Japanese or Asian than a lot of their Caucasian counterparts, which is curious enough. But because the connotation of being Asian in this country has been so negative— because of wars, because of exclusion laws and so on, it is not a com- fortable identity to be wearing. Not only is it inaccurate, but it’s frequently insulting. By wearing the Superman outfit under- neath I’m saying, “I, too, aspire to those American values that are in this country, to those rewards available for working hard and trying to attain success, like every other American, regardless of their cultural background or ethnic heritage.”
Superman, as an emblem, is not new in your art. In fact, when I began preparing for this interview and consulted your papers at the Archives of American Art, the first file, quite literally, that I pulled out had on top an earlier photograph of you wearing a Superman shirt (fig. 1). In this instance, the T-shirt is underneath a more standard, if you will, Western-style blazer. It suggested to me that themes that we see coming out today in your work are ones that are deeply woven through your career. I believe the photograph was made around the time that you were working on [the perfor- mance piece] Seven Kabuki Plays (fig. 2). And, of course, Superman features quite prominently in that project, which, as I understand it, is based on diaries that were kept by your grandmother, Toku Shimomura.
Yes, it is one of the first times that Superman appeared. Although, prior to the performance, there were some paintings in one of the early Diary series that I did in the early 1980s [in which Superman appears], and [when I was painting them] I immediately thought of Superman when I thought of America. What represents America? What is the icon? There wasn’t even a contest involved in trying to decide—Superman immediately represented everything about America at that time, during World War II. It certainly wasn’t a flattering depiction of America, but that’s exactly how I intended it.
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