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Transcription: [00:08:00]
{SPEAKER name="Jasmine Fernandez"}
Were you always, were you always a painter or like when do you really start that art form?

[00:08:07]
{SPEAKER name="Roger Shimomura"}
Ah, well I, from the time I was a child, I loved to draw and ah we I had three uncles that were all artists and they were all very accomplished artists in Seattle, they were sort of my role models when I grew up, but I wanted to be a commercial artist and make a lot of money.

[00:08:30]
{SPEAKER name="Jasmine Fernandez"}
Aha

[00:08:31]
{SPEAKER name="Roger Shimomura"}
and uh, I found out very quickly that um I didn't work well with clients.

[00:08:40]
{SPEAKER name="Jasmine Fernandez"}
(laughs)

[00:08:41]
{SPEAKER name="Roger Shimomura"}
and came to the realization that it's almost the exact opposite of being a fine artist because when you're a commercial artist you have to do what the client likes you know

[00:08:55]
and you have to do what more people like, what the mass public likes, when you are a fine artist it becomes very egocentric, so it's really the opposite.

[00:09:09]
So um I ended up changing after 7 years, after graduation, I ended up going back to school and studying painting.

[00:09:20]
{SPEAKER name="Jasmine Fernandez"}

Mhm
[00:09:20]
{SPEAKER name="Roger Shimomura"}
And ah been doing that ever since. I taught painting and drawing and performance art before while I was at the University of Kansas and performance art was really my favorite part of that whole experience.

[00:09:39]
I taught it for 20 years and I was doing it myself too.

[00:09:42]
{SPEAKER name="Jasmine Fernandez"}
Oh
{SPEAKER name="Roger Shimomura"}
I wasn't acting, but I was writing, directing and producing, and uh did these performances all over the country

[00:09:53]
{SPEAKER name="Jasmine Fernandez"}
And why was that your favorite over painting?

[00:09:56]
{SPEAKER name="Roger Shimomura"}
Because it- I was able to draw from a lot of the things my grandmother and grandfather left, and my grandmother left 56 years worth of dairies

[00:10:06]
over her entire experience living in America um and she also, you know, being the immigrant, the pioneer,

[00:10:14]
had a real sense of history and so she ah made a lot of ah she wrote a lot of articles about her experience in this country

[00:10:27]
{SPEAKER name="Jasmine Fernandez"}
Mhm

[00:10:29]
{SPEAKER name="Roger Shimomura"}
and during the war, in camp, wrote a lot of haiku and poems and wrote songs

[00:10:37]
um that really defined the popular notion that the Japanese-American, especially Issei

[00:10:47]
were real quiet, the first generation were real quiet and just kind of accepted it

[00:10:51]
{SPEAKER name="Jasmine Fernandez"}
Mhm

[00:10:52]
{SPEAKER name="Roger Shimomura"}
Um because they were irate

[00:10:55]
{SPEAKER name="Jasmine Fernandez"}
Mhm

[00:10:56]
{SPEAKER name="Roger Shimomura"}
and these poems showed it and they were written to folk songs, Japanese folks songs so they would recite these poems of anger

[00:11:06]
but singing songs that they knew from Japan, so anyway, I had all this information that, you know, she had left behind, and photographs, and everything else, and uh you can't paint about those things

[00:11:22]
{SPEAKER name="Jasmine Fernandez"}
Mhm

[00:11:23]
{SPEAKER name="Roger Shimomura"}
and so I decided to write some you know small performance pieces and I've always been interested in watching it happen, not being in it myself,

[00:11:34]
(cough) and directing, and um so one thing led to another, and before you knew it, I was doing it ah, 50% of my time was spent traveling around you know, putting these on, and they are all about the, the Asian-American experience

[00:11:53]
{SPEAKER name="Roger Shimomura"}
We did one here, in fact, at the, I think it was the American Art Museum, I can't remember, but it was all about the incarceration period

[00:12:05]
{SPEAKER name="Jasmine Fernandez"}
Mhm

[00:12:06]
{SPEAKER name="Roger Shimomura"}
and about an hour long program, and that's the show that we took around through about 15 different locations

[00:12:14]
{SPEAKER name="Jasmine Fernandez"}
That's nice

[00:12:15]
{SPEAKER name="Roger Shimomura"}
around the country, but that was really became my first love especially when I started teaching it, and it eventually turned into a major area of study and you could actually get your degree in Performance now at Kansas and ah



[00:12:29]

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