Yoshiko Shimada

is a Japanese printmaker and performance artist who has been referred to as "Japan’s premier feminist and antiwar artist."

Shimada has been exploring issues of gender, power, history, and nation in her artwork since the late 1980s, situating her artwork within her own complex socio-political context of being Asian, Japanese, and a woman. Her works have been exhibited expansively, both within Japan and internationally. Shimada has curated art exhibitions in Japan and abroad, and she lectures on Japanese art, politics, and feminism at the University of Tokyo. Growing up near the base, which was formerly used by the Japanese Imperial Army, exposed Shimada to US-Japan postwar tensions from a young age during the tumultuous 1960s.

Shimada attended university in the U.S., graduating in 1982 with a BA in Fine Art from Scripps College in Claremont, California, before returning to Japan to study etching under Mono-ha artist Yoshida Katsurō at the alternative art school Biggakō in Tokyo. Shimada also spent time living in Berlin and New York City and is comfortable with both the German and English language, which has aided her in building a transnational platform for her body of work. Shimada participated in the MoMA PS1 Studio Program in 1998-1999. Her work is included in the Asian American Arts Centre's professional digital archive of Asian and Asian American contemporary visual artists.

'Past Imperfect' Series (early 1990s) Shimada moved to Berlin after graduating from university in the U.S., where she observed artists engaging with issues of German war responsibility after World War II.

Shimada’s early series of etchings entitled “Past Imperfect” engaged with the artist's deep interest in gender roles while challenging the popular viewpoint that the Asia-Pacific War was an 'unavoidable tragedy.' Her imagery explored the role of Japanese women who had contributed to the Imperial war effort, in her attempt to intervene in this often overlooked reality of wartime responsibility. Through these comparisons, Shimada sought to demonstrate how Japanese women also participated in and strengthened the war effort.

The etching A House of Comfort (1993) juxtaposed a mansion-like ‘comfort station,’ the state-sponsored brothel used by Japanese soldiers during the war, against a portrait of a disrobed ‘comfort woman’ as a visual narrative that questioned the idea of home, nation, and the cost of war. Japanese women’s photographs and quotations are depicted on right-hand pages with the Korean women’s on the left. Close-up portraits of former ‘comfort women’ with their mouths cropped were placed inside chained black wooden boxes that were exhibited in the gallery with the lids off, while audial recordings of women’s voices giving testimony of their wartime experiences were played throughout the gallery continuously. The installation, in which she solicited the war memories of museum visitors and incorporated them into the exhibit, has also been exhibited in seven other international locations, including the Philippines, Thailand, Indonesia, Canada, and Denmark.

Censorship Although Shimada is now recognized as an important artist in Japan, the critical nature of her artwork initially made her career difficult because the exhibition and distribution of her work was generally more accepted in countries outside of her home country. She reported that although her work had never been explicitly shut down, she had experienced “soft” censorship in the form of audience outrage and curatorial reluctance, concluding that it is much easier for her to exhibit her work in Germany (where she was living at the time) than in her native Japan.

Also in 2019, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs withdrew its support for another exhibition due to its political nature, the Japan Unlimited at the MuseumsQuartier Wien in Vienna, Austria, which also included one of Shimada’s etchings from her and BuBu’s Made in Occupied Japan (1998) series.

Curating

Shimada is active as a curator in Japan and internationally.

Exhibition history

Selected solo exhibitions Source: Escape from 'Oneself' (2001), Centre A, Vancouver, Canada Kyoto Seika University Gallery (2000), Kyoto Asia/Pacific Studies Institute, New York, University, New York A Space Gallery (1997), Toronto John Batten Gallery (1997), Hong Kong Hiraya Gallery (1997), Manila Keio University Art Centre (1996), Tokyo Ota Fine Arts (1996, 1998, 2002), Tokyo

Selected group exhibitions Source: Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography, Tokyo Keio University Art Center Kyoto Seika University, Kyoto Yoshiko Shimada; Art Activism 1992-98 (1998) - Yoshiko Shimada. OTA Fine Arts (Tokyo, Japan) Twilight Sleep: Momoyo Torimitsu, Noboru Tsubaki, Ryoko Aoki Zon Ito, Ken Ikeda, Kyupi Kyupi, Hiroshi Ono, Yoshiko Shimada (2000) - Istituto Giaponese di Cultura (Rome, Italy) Escape from 'OneSelf' (2002), OTA Fine Arts (Tokyo, Japan)