Biography

Bruce Yonemoto was raised in Santa Clara Valley (now Silicon Valley) as the son of Japanese Americans interned during WWII by the American government. His work is informed by his family’s history of racial discrimination and forced incarceration. His work as a video and digital installation artist, educator, writer, and curator (many of the works done in collaboration with his brother, Norman) began in the mid-1970s. The body of single-channel video artwork was created from 1976 to the late 1980s examined the effects of the mass media on our perceptions of personal identity (psychoanalytical, sexual, ethnic, and political), romantic love, melodramas and soap operas to TV commercials and media critique (the ultimate products of Hollywood’s search for audience identification and manipulation), desired to manipulate audiences while making them aware of that manipulation. Since 1989, his solo work has been exploring experimental cinema and video art within the context of installation, photography, and sculpture. An important part of Yonemoto’s development as an artist came from doing post-graduate work in Tokyo in the early 70s, which helped form his sense of identity and purpose.

For the last 5 years, his work was presented in over 30 separate venues including major retrospectives at Anthology Film Forum in New York, the Tate Modern in London, and the Hamburg Kunstverein, Germany, and solo presentations internationally, Manila, Mexico City, and Taipei. His archives are being acquired by the Getty Museum in Los Angeles. He has had solo exhibitions at Alexander Gray Gallery, New York, Blum & Poe, Los Angeles, Tomio Koyama, Tokyo, Galerie Quynh, Ho Chi Minh City, and his work was featured in Los Angeles 1955-85 at the Pompidou Center, Paris, and the Generali Foundation, Vienna, the 2008 Gwangju Biennial. Pacific Standard Time, Getty Research Center, and most recently an expansive survey show in Kanazawa, Japan. He was also the 2022 recipient of the prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship. Bruce Yonemoto.com.