An Asian Survey – Bruce Yonemoto

An Asian Survey presents selected works from the established oeuvre of Bruce Yonemoto, which explore the creation of meaning through filmic representations and analyze the ways mass media sustains our perceptions of individual identity and personal memory.

Our survey begins in the fantasy space of Disneyland – a world we embrace as a fantastical but temporary reprieve from the banalities of everyday life. However, fantasy is not temporary, and it has itself become banal. Fantasy constructions have seeped into our most personal interpretations of our very selves, as if bleeding into our souls, which have themselves become fictional. And so we ask ourselves simple questions: How do we differentiate our personal memories from all of the stories we have eagerly consumed? How can we even understand ourselves without reference to Hollywood narratives, gossip magazines, and banal TV shows? The media seduces us – we the willing – and we frequently forget that happy and pleasant memories necessarily coexist with tragedy and misery. It is obvious that there can be no happiness without misery, but where does misery begin and happiness end? Is there a delimitable border that we can recognize and perhaps manipulate? In other words, is there a space between?

The art of Bruce Yonemoto reveals a world where notions of identity are continually reformulating, and image culture rediscovers the human. —Curator / Freya Chou

Bruce Yonemoto (b. 1949) is a video artist, educator, writer and curator. The body of single channel video work was created from 1976 to the late 1980’s examined the effects of the mass media on our perceptions of personal identity (sexual, ethnic, and political), romantic love, melodramas and soap operas to TV commercials and the electronic metatext (the ultimate products of Hollywood’s search for audience identification and manipulation), desired to manipulate audiences while making them aware of that manipulation. Since 1989, his solo works have been exploring experimental cinema and video art within the context of installation, photography and sculpture.

Yonemoto has been honored with numerous awards and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the American Film Institute, The Rockefeller Foundation, and the Maya Deren Award for Experimental Film and Video. In 1999, Yonemoto was honored with a major mid-career survey show curated by Karen Higa at the Japanese American Museum in Los Angeles. Bruce’s solo installations, photographs and sculptures have been featured in major one-person shows at the ICC in Tokyo, the Pompidou Center, Paris, the 2008 Gwangju Biennial, Getty Research Center and most recently an expansive survey show in Kanazawa, Japan.

Freya Chou is Curator of Education and Public Programmes at Para Site, Hong Kong. From 2004 to 2008, she coordinated exhibitions at the Taipei Fine Arts Museum, including the 5th and 6th Taipei Biennials. She was assistant curator of the 7th Taipei Biennale in 2010 and co-curator of the 10th Shanghai Biennale in 2014. Also in 2014, she foundedYiBen Book, an independent publishing house committed to producing artists’ books. Chou contributes to periodicals including Artist Magazine (Taiwan), ARTCO Magazine (Taiwan), LEAP (China) and ArtReview Asia (China).

2015.09.19 16:00