Supreme: Resplendent, 2002, detail [Enlarge in New Window]

Lynne Yamamoto: Resplendent

Resplendent began with a book that Lynne Yamamoto encountered on a trip to Japan: a selection of letters written in support of Nagasaki Mayor Hitoshi Motoshima, who, as Emperor Hirohito lay on his deathbed, suggested that the monarch should have borne some responsibility for the war. It was a controversial statement; Motoshima received death threats from right-wing conservatives, along with more than 7,000 letters of support from all over the country. Yamamoto found herself profoundly moved by what she read. "These letters from people of many generations revealed how deep and complex the impact of World War II had been," she says.

With the letters at the heart of the project, Yamamoto first envisioned Resplendent as three related elements: a pair of sculpture-filled vitrines and a wall covering in gunmetal gray, edged at the bottom with images of young Japanese men who'd died in the war. Each of these elements was intended to evoke the emotions and ideas expressed in the letters. But Yamamoto soon found that her original concept felt "kind of programmatic. As I worked on the project I got farther away from doing something directly inspired by the letters. It's hard to work that way." Instead, the installation evolved in a subtly different direction. "It's a visual piece," Yamamoto says. "It needed a strong symbolic referent. I found it in the cherry blossom."

The results of Yamamoto's explorations first appeared in an exhibition at New York's P.P.O.W. Gallery in 2001. As one of what New York Times critic Holland Cotter has called her "austere but often sensuous installations," Resplendent featured a wall covered with cherry blossoms--each with the face of a dead Japanese soldier at its center--along with other elements linking them to Japanese militarism and the country's role in the war. In a text accompanying the exhibition, Yamamoto referred to the piece as "an ambivalent memorial." Writing in Artforum, Kirby Gookin likened it to "a Japanese screen painting come alive," noting that it "fused symbols of life, death, and rebirth into a poetic amalgam."

For Yamamoto, however, Resplendent didn't completely fulfill the ambition she had for the project, so she's rethinking it. "I'm scheduled to present the complete project at the Munson Williams Proctor Gallery in Utica, New York in March 2003," she says, adding that she would like it to tour further. "The space I'm being given at Munson Williams Proctor has different architectural characteristics than P.P.O.W.," she says. "It's less suited to an installation and more to discrete objects in a space. I'm working on a video piece, too, and that will probably be included."

Born and raised in Hawaii, Yamamoto came to the mainland in 1981 to attend The Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington. She received her master's degree from New York University in 1991. An educator as well as an artist, she continues to teach at high schools, colleges, and graduate schools around New York City.

Much of Yamamoto's earlier work was inspired by the life of her maternal grandmother, who traveled from Japan to Hawaii as a picture bride, working as a laundress on a sugar plantation. "Through my art-making process," Yamamoto writes, "I invoke characteristics of the kind of work she did: repetitive, labor-intensive, stultifying. The materials I use are also delicate yet strong, descriptive of her character." The hundreds of cherry blossoms in Resplendent, for instance, were digitally printed, but cut by hand.

As work on the project continues, Yamamoto says, "I've realized that a really important part of this is examining my own position on the material and the war--being born in Hawaii and having my family be in Hawaii during the war. I can imagine but cannot inhabit the position of a Japanese person from Japan. My uncles fought for the United States in Europe. My relationship and my family's relationship to the war has this other dimension that I'm dealing with and that I see as part of completing the work."

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THIS PROJECT'S CATEGORIES: Visual > Photography | Asian Themes | History | New York | 2001