Tag: Japanese-American

Japanese Prints – Echoes of the Floating World at Tacoma Art Museum

Now through January 2026 at the Tacoma Art Museum, experience a unique fusion of history and modernity. Explore dozens of historic Japanese prints displayed alongside contemporary Pacific Northwest artworks inspired by the timeless ukiyo-e tradition.

Affordable and portable, Japanese woodblock prints (ukiyo-e) allowed everyday people in Edo-period Japan (18th-19th century) to collect art. When Japan opened up to the West in the late 1800s, Europeans brought many of these prints back where they inspired artists like Van Gogh, Manet, and Degas.

Utagawa Hiroshige b. Edo, Japan. Plum Garden Kamata 1857.

These works’ striking beauty and captivating subject matter drew global attention for decades. The visual style bled into Japanese tattoo art (irezumi) and influenced Japanese comics (manga), both of which have gained popularity in the West from the late 20th century onward.

Kenji Stoll, a Tacoma-based muralist and tattooist, practices traditional Japanese and American ink styles. Drawing from the TAM’s extensive ukiyo-e collection—thanks to donations from Constance Lyon and Al and Betsy Buck—Stoll, as guest curator, selected Japanese ukiyo-e prints alongside works by contemporary Pacific Northwest artists. Some artists are Japanese-American, others are Asian-American or Latin-American, or have lived in Japan.

As you enter the gallery, a large ukiyo-e mural by Stoll greets you, alongside sculptures and paintings by local artists inspired by Japanese styles.

Kenji Stoll b. in Tacoma, WA – Nikkei Butterfly, 2025, site specific mural.

VANVAN a local artist influenced by 20th-century pop culture, creates paintings that evoke manga and Japanese toys. Other artists, like Lauren Lida explore personal topics through the lens of Japanese print traditions, such as Lida’s investigation into intergenerational trauma from Japanese internment. Hanako O’Leary reinterprets Japanese aesthetics in contemporary sculptures.

VANVAN, b. in Bremerton WA – Panko – 2025

As you move through the exhibit, you’ll encounter original Japanese prints depicting dramatic Kabuki actors, heroic warriors, and serene landscapes.

This exhibition offers a rare opportunity to view these works up close. Admire their delicate lines, textures, and dynamic compositions. Utagawa Kuniyoshi known for his prints of warriors (samurai) and supernatural creatures (yokai), also created works featuring dancers and anthropomorphic animals in motion.

Utagawa Kuniyoshi b. Edo, Japan – Celebration of springtime in the year of the Monkey: Turtle and Crane under the pine tree. 1847-1848.

Tsukioka Yoshitoshi a student of Kuniyoshi, is also famous for samurai and yokai. A selection from his One Hundred Aspects of the Moon is featured here, showcasing layers of patterns and textures. The delicate lines and expressive calligraphy stand out.

Tsukioka Yoshitoshi b. Edo, Japan, 1839 – I wish I had gone to bed immediately, but now the night has passed and I watch the moon descend. After 1887.

Across from these works are pieces by Yoshiko Yamamoto, a Tokyo-born artist who lived in the Pacific Northwest for 30 years before returning to Japan. Some of her works feature Tacoma-area subjects, influenced by Japanese ink-block style. Her work blends late 20th-century freshness with a bridge between contemporary and Western styles.

Yoshiko Yamamoto, b. Tokyo Japan, 1967 – Mt. Ranier, Summer Lake, 2024

My personal favorite is a triptych by Kawanabe Kyosai, a student of Kuniyoshi and later a follower of the Kano school. His work is more painterly, reflecting the transition from the Edo to the Meiji period. Kyosai is considered one of Japan’s first modernist artists.

Kawanabe Kyosai b. Japan – Top and bottom – sections from Kyosai’s Illustrated Account of a Hundred Demons, 1889.

His art shows a clear influence on modern manga, particularly in the playful and macabre expressions that would later shape Japanese cartooning.

Back to the local artists, inspired by both history and manga, we see works by Tacoma artist and tattooist Troy Long.

Troy Long b. Tacoma, WA Title pending – 2025

Echoes of the Floating World runs through Jan. 4, 2026 at the Tacoma Art Museum. The exhibition actually contains 60 works, but that they will not all be shown at once due to the damage that light can cause to these prints. There will be three rotations of 20-25 pieces between now and the exhibit’s January 2026 wrap-up. Please visit and visit again to see this full collection that Tacoma is honored with!

“Resilience – A Sansei Sense of Legacy”

Kristine Aono, Daruma of Resilience, 2019 – 2021 – A large daruma doll that invited children to post notes of their own hopes and dreams. Courtesy of the Washington State History Museum website – Photograph by Chris Barclay.

“Resilience – A Sansei Sense of Legacy”, an exhibit of art works by eight Sansei (third generation) Japanese-American artists is running until July 7, 2023, at the Washington State History Museum. The show reflects upon the multi-generational impacts of the wartime Executive Order 9066 that sent their families to internment camps.

From Exhibits USA, this touring exhibit was produced by the Mid-America Arts Alliance and curated by Gail Enns and Jerry Takigawa.

It’s difficult to convey the full impact of some of these pieces – one by Wendy Maruyama, has the heaviest presence, consisting of three tree-like bundles, suspended from the ceiling, consisting of replications of the over hundred thousand internment camp identification tags. The original exhibition featured 10 of these, like a forest….each representing one of the ten sites where the US government interned Japanese-Americans during WWII. These tall structures tower over you, sobering you with the enormity of these tags, each representing a Japanese-American, pulled away from their homes, in suspension with 120,000 others for 3-5 years.

Wendy Maruyama – The Tag Project 2011. Replications of camp identification tags.

Reiko Fujii interviewed members of different families who had been interned, in order to capture and share their story. One woman’s story was especially moving and shocking; she had been born and raised in Peru, but for reasons which many Americans don’t realize, the US government asked several Latin American countries to extradict Japanese from their countries after Pearl Harbor. She and her family (and thousands of other Japanese in Latin America) were taken to the US internment camps because they were of Japanese ancestral origin. (For context, during the late 19th-early 20th century there was an influx of Japanese that left Japan to move to Latin America – part of a larger Japanese diaspora during Meiji.)

This woman was 7 years old when she and her family were taken to the US, where they did not speak the language. After the war, even more shocking was that as ‘illegal aliens’ they could not move to communities in the US, but Peru it turned out no longer wanted them either. Their only alternative was to be sent “back” to Japan, a country devastated by the war and not their “home”. There would be no promise of resources or support for them. Her father was very ill, so because of this they stayed an additional two years in the camp until the US allowed them to stay and settle in Berkeley, CA.

To honor not only those Fujii interviewed but to symbolically honor all 120,000 interned, the artist constructed a kimono of 2,000 hand cut glass pieces holding hundreds of fused photographs and stiched with copper wire.

Reiko Fujii – Detained Enemy Alien Glass Kimono – 2017

The last works that really stood out were open ended and subjective. Na Omi Judy Shintani installed three vintage kimono – one black, one red, and one white, on poles, each above an offering bowl. Out of each of these she took cuttings, in circles or in the shape of flowers, and each of these pieces were placed lovingly into these bowls. She describes the process as one of meditation, discovery, and conversation with her ancestors. Perhaps akin to conversations one has with family or within oneself over traumatic topics – there are holes, gaps, silences….there are pieces missing, from one’s family, from oneself. There’s damage, violation of these beautiful garments, just as there was violence inflicted on these families, to their dreams and their belongings….But those pieces that remained – like cut flowers, are now being honored.

Na Omi Judy Shintani – Deconstructed Kimono – 2011