nwasianweekly.com
Aug. 19, 2006

Image provided by the artist and Wing Luke Asian Museum

“Battle of Midway,” by Mirikitani

By Ann-Marie Stillion
Northwest Asian Weekly

Would the world be a better place if we started sending art supplies to our soldiers along with the guns? Could mental and physical health be restored if art classes were added to nutrition notes and courses on how to get a job? Can the failures of our history be turned into successes if our stories were heard, acted upon and kept before us? Does the individual act matter at all in the face of overwhelming tragedy? Do our relationships with one another matter?

“Yes!” a diminutive exhibit at Wing Luke Asian Museum calls out. Stuck casually to the walls, drawings, collages and paintings represent the life of artist Jimmy Tsutomu Mirikitani, a life that might have been silenced by countless disasters but instead has become a shiny beacon of what is possible in a life well lived, however difficult.

A survivor of the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II, his work and life reminds viewers that all actions, government and individual, have consequences both good and bad. Still, the artwork in the exhibit reflects the artist’s resilience and unrelenting commitment to making his mark.

Born in California in 1920, his family moved to Hiroshima, Japan, when he was 5. As a young man, he studied at the prestigious Tokyo Art College. In 1939, he moved back to Seattle and, a few years later, found himself caught up in the mass relocation of Japanese Americans up and down the West Coast. He spent three and a half years at Tule Lake. Many of his works reflect his memories of that time. And the bombing of Hiroshima. And, more recently, the collapse of the World Trade Center buildings.

Mirikitani has addressed the evils he has been confronted with, brandishing his collages and paintings like weapons of mass construction. He increasingly finds his work hanging in galleries, but to the artist, it is history — his personal history and that of his time.

By all accounts, Mirikitani makes art incessantly, oblivious to how the world sees him or his art. He had a friendship with Jackson Pollock in the 1950s. There is a record of early exhibits and even relationships with some famous collectors. Still, by the year 2000, he lived mostly on the street, selling his pictures of fat cats or fanciful fish to passersby.

When an online seller put Mirikitani’s work on eBay, the artist Roger Shimomura, who also curated this Wing Luke exhibit, saw it and became intrigued. Shimomura tracked him down and eventually met Mirikitani in New York City.

Shimomura became one of the elder artist’s moral supporters. “I stopped in to see him every time I went to New York, which was about four times a year,” Shimomura said. “I’d bring him sushi or some art supplies or some visual material that I knew he would use in his collages. Sure enough, the next time I would see him, they would be Xeroxed, cut up and pasted in new compositions. … When Linda started videotaping him, things became more purposeful and his life changed for the better.”

Clips from a newly released and already award-winning documentary directed by Linda Hattendorf on the life of the artist form another element of the exhibit. Videotaping began soon after she met him drawing on a cold winter night at the beginning of 2001. An accomplished film editor, she immediately began to document the aging artist’s life in order to try to help him and to highlight the plight of elderly people living on the street.

Their acquaintance continued throughout that year. On Sept. 11, she found him hunched over his drawings as usual, not far from the smoking ruin of the World Trade Center. One of the drawings of the falling towers can be found on the walls of the current exhibit. Too proud to accept her offer to come inside to her apartment that terrible day, the filmmaker recounts how she finally moved him by reminding him of a story he had told her: how the people in Hiroshima didn’t know that the air was poison. His move to her small apartment deepened their connection.

The result of their friendship is the film “The Cats of Mirikitani,” which will air next year on public television. The film and a nexus of thoughtful friends and colleagues have sparked a renewed interest in his art, links to old friends and the discovery of long-lost relatives.

Call it the virtue of a life lived well or just happenstance, but all seems to have come full circle for this artist who has said that he plans to keep “drawing until my heart stops.”

The exhibit “Jimmy Tsutomu Mirikitani” runs through Sept. 17 at the Wing Luke Asian Museum, 407 Seventh Ave. S., Seattle. Cost is free-$4. For more information, visit www.wingluke.org.

Ann-Marie Stillion can be reached at annmarie@nwasianweekly.com.

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