Street Nihonga Reflections
Read an interpretive text about one of Mirikitani’s works that is part of the Tule Lake Memory-Scape section, written by his closest friends and documentarians, Linda Hattendorf and Masa Yoshikawa, together with curator Maki Kaneko. This text is reprinted from the exhibition catalogue, which features many more essays and analyses for those interested in exploring Mirikitani’s work in greater depth.
Jimmy Tsutomu Mirikitani, untitled (Tule Lake collage), after 2002, Museum purchase: R. Charles and Mary Margaret Clevenger Art Acquisition Fund, 2020.0219
untitled (Tule Lake)
Hattendorf
A tiny rabbit hops through a wild disarray of paint, seeds, cutouts, and fistfuls of dry grass grabbed hastily in the desert heat. A child sleeps on a leaf. A red torii—gate to a famous shrine on Miyajima Island—stands tall and proud, an emblem of a Hiroshima childhood, glimmering like a mirage, fragile, ephemeral, almost lost in the swirls of color.3 I am there with my cat. Jimmy includes himself, standing solemnly at a dedication for those who died while unjustly imprisoned during WWII, in faded black and white, archival, a newsprint memory. This piece emerged after his return to the site of the Tule Lake camp sixty years later, walking again through the same grasses that brushed against him so many years ago as he paced behind a barbed wire fence.
Yoshikawa
Jimmy always liked to pick up objects like pebbles, nuts such as pine cones, pieces of wood or leaves, etc. when he went out. When he found something he liked, he would put it in his pocket or ask Linda to keep it and bring it back home. Some of them became his art or part of artwork.
Jimmy also spoke about the incarceration camps on various occasions:
“My sister was also at the assembly center. The mess hall had been freshly painted, but it used to be a stable for horses and cows. I couldn’t stand the smell. I hated it. I couldn’t stay in a place like that. There was talk of ten people going to Tule Lake in the summer, and I signed up right away. I volunteered to go to Tule Lake. I told my sister, ‘I’m going to Tule Lake,’ and we were separated. That was the last time I saw her. I haven’t seen her in fifty years.”
“Tule Lake is filled with painful memories. I remember everything. I remember the dead people’s faces.”
Curator's Comment
I still remember the shock I felt when I first encountered this work. It was badly damaged, and unlike Mirikitani’s other pieces on the Tule Lake theme, its subject was not immediately discernible. Hattendorf explained to me that Mirikitani created this piece on-site during the 2002 pilgrimage tour to Tule Lake—presumably his first visit in about fifty years—though some photographic elements may have been added later.
While many of Mirikitani’s Tule Lake works follow recurring compositional patterns and motifs, this piece stands apart in its abstraction. It consists of a series of swiftly brushed lines in red, green, and yellow, interwoven with dried leaves he gathered at the site and a group of affixed photographs, including one of Hattendorf and the other of himself. The work resists a straightforward interpretation. Yet, despite—or perhaps because of—its apparent incomprehensibility, it resonated deeply with me and appears to be an “authentic” record of what Mirikitani might have felt upon returning to Tule Lake.
Marcel Proust wrote, “The past is hidden somewhere outside the realm, beyond the reach of intellect, in some material object (in the sensation which that material object will give us) which we do not suspect.”4 In my view, this work captures such a moment—not a past suddenly resurfacing, but one that had always remained with Mirikitani, revisited with new intensity upon his return to Tule Lake. Being physically present at the site again—seeing the landscape, picking up leaves—may have evoked a surge of sensations, which he then, as an artist, sought to capture through his brushstrokes, preserving the fleeting moment of memory on paper.