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.
Biography
Shimada was born and raised in Tachikawa, western Tokyo, near the U.S. Air Force Base where her father worked during the height of the US's military involvement in Southeast Asia. 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. In 2015, she received her PhD from Kingston University, London.
Career
Shimada’s oeuvre engages with the way that wartime history has been preserved and perpetuated in attitudes and cultural memory in present-day Japanese society, with particular interest in the role of women in World War II as both aggressors and victims. She claims that her aim is not simply to point fingers at the accused, but rather to explore how structures of imperialism are implicated in both the past and present. In the artist’s own words, “there is no clear borderline between the oppressors and the oppressed anymore.”
Shimada's works are held by the New York Public Library, Tokyo Photographic Art Museum, Keio University Art Center, Kyoto Seika University, and City University of New York. 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. She began to explore the representation of war history and memory within her own artwork following the death of the Showa Emperor in 1989, when she was troubled by nostalgic portrayals of Japan’s wartime history. She was angered by what she viewed as a failure of the Japanese press and media to reflect on anything other than a romantic version of the past. Shimada began to explicitly deal with the issue of ‘comfort women’ in the early 1990s, after three Korean women who had filed lawsuits again the Japanese government gave the testimony of their experiences as ‘comfort women’ during the Asia Pacific War.
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.' She debuted this series together at Tanishima Gallery in Tokyo’s Meguro Ward in 1993, presenting 25 xerox transfer etchings compiled from newspaper clippings and archival photographs of various women during the Asia-Pacific War. 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.
The etching Shooting Lesson (1992) was regarded as one of the most critical works from the series, presenting a photograph of the wives of Japanese military police stationed in Korea receiving shooting lessons for self-protection against the local population, juxtaposed with the portraits of four Korean comfort women. Through these comparisons, Shimada sought to demonstrate how Japanese women also participated in and strengthened the war effort.