Looking for Jiro
2011, 5:45 minutes
single-channel digital video with sound

Looking for Jiro is a queer meditation on the incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II. Jiro Onuma worked in the prison mess hall and liked muscular men. How did this dandy gay bachelor survive imprisonment? This queer musical mash-up video features drag king performance, U.S. propaganda footage, muscle building, and homoerotic bread making.

Award
Best Experimental Film, Austin Gay & Lesbian Film Festival, 2012;

Screenings
Garage MU, Paris, 2023;
Treize Galerie, Paris, 2023;
Paris College of Art, 2023;
Marseille Underground Film & Music Festival, 2023;
Documenta 15, Kassel, Germany, 2022;
Echo Park Film Center, Los Angeles, 2018;
Japanese Avant-Garde and Experimental Film Festival, London, 2018;
Alphawood Gallery, Chicago, 2017;
Silicon Valley Asian Pacific Film Festival, San Jose, 2017;
Who’s Your Dandy?, Edinburgh, 2017;
Festival of (In)Appropriation #6, Los Angeles, 2014;
Queer Week Film Festival, Paris, 2013;
MIX Mexico, 17th Sexual Diversity Film/Video Festival, Mexico City, 2013;
SPIRIT: Queer Asian American Activism, San Francisco, 2013;
Rio Gay Film Festival, Rio de Janeiro, 2013;
Centre for Contemporary Arts, Digital Desperados, Glasgow, 2013;
TranScreen Film Festival, Amsterdam, 2013;
Hamburg International Queer Film Festival, 2013;
30th San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival, 2012;
Outfest Fusion: Los Angeles LGBT People of Color Film Festival, 2012;
50th Ann Arbor Film Festival, 2012;
30th Los Angeles Asian Pacific Film Festival, 2012;
8th Queer Women of Color Film Festival, San Francisco, 2012;
28th Boston LGBT Film Festival, 2012;
CMG Short Film Festival, Los Angeles, 2012;
Frameline 36: San Francisco International LGBT Film Festival, 2012;
MIX Milan: Lesbian and Gay Film Festival, 2012;
Austin Gay & Lesbian Film Festival, 2012;
Japan Foundation, Mami Art Center, Hanoi, 2012;
Green Papaya Art Projects, Quezon City, Philippines, 2012;
Homoscope International Queer Experimental Film, Video & Arts, Austin, 2011;
MIX NYC: 24th New York Queer Experimental Film Festival, 2011;

Exhibitions
After Hope: Videos of Resistance, Peabody Essex Museum, 2023;
Play and Loop IV, Blindspot Gallery, Hong Kong, 2022;
After Hope: Videos of Resistance, Asian Art Museum, 2021;
Queer California, Untold Stories, Oakland Museum of California, 2019;
Recollected: Photography and the Archive, Fine Arts Gallery, 2017;
Loving After A Lifetime of All This, La Esquina, Kansas City, MO, 2015;
Loving After A Lifetime of All This, Center for Craft, Asheville, NC, 2014-15;
Facing West/Looking East, Oceanside Museum of Art, 2012-13;
Nothing to Declare, Vargas Museum, Philippines, 2012;
Past Present Future Imperatives: Queer Space Time, Sabina Lee Gallery, Los Angeles, 2012;
The Future Is Now: Asian America on Its Own Terms, SOMArts, 2012;

Press / Publications
EG Crichton, Matchmaking in the Archive: 19 Conversations with the Dead and 3 Encounters with Ghosts (Rutgers University Press, 2023), 24-31

Angelique Santos and Editors, “Pause, Rewind, ‘Play and Loop’ at Blindspot Gallery,” Art Asia Pacific (September 2, 2022)

J.L. Odom, “Asian Art Museum’s Virtual ‘Queer Pasts and Futures’ to Showcase Two SF Artists’ LGBTQ-centering Experimental Films,” Local News Matters (July 26, 2022), republished in SFGate (July 28, 2022)

Jenni Sorkin, “Time Goes By So Slowly: Tina Takemoto’s Queer Futurity,” Panorama: The Journal of the Association of Historians of American Art 7.1 (Spring 2021)

Marci Kwon, Introduction to “Asian American Art, Pasts and Futures,” Panorama: The Journal of the Association of Historians of American Art 7.1 (Spring 2021)

Tim Brinkof, “Turning Art into Activism with ‘After Hope,’” Mubi: Notebook Feature (Sept 8, 2021)

Winston Kyan, “After Hope: Videos of Resistance,” CAA.reviews (August 16, 2021)

“Camp Resistance: Tina Takemoto’s video Looking for Jiro explores the queer experience during Japanese internment,” The Art Newspaper (June 3, 2021)

Emily Wilson, “‘Looking for Hope and Clinging to Hope’ Short Films for Our Times,” Hyperallergic (February 22, 2021)

Vivian Huang, “Asian American Queer Performance,” The Oxford Research Encyclopedias: Literature and Culture, (Oxford University Press, 2020)

Vivian Huang, “Sparking Joy, Serving Mess: The Drag of Asian/American History,” The Journal of Popular Culture 53.6 (2020), 1373-1390

Tina Takemoto, “Queer Exhaustion, Speculation, Despair,” Saturation: Racial Matter, Institutional Limits, and the Excesses of Representation, ed. C. Riley Snorton and Hentyle Yapp, (MIT Press, 2020), 105-114

Leila Grothe, “Queer California: Untold Stories,” exhibition review, Panorama: Journal of the Association of Historians of American Art (Fall 2019)

Will Dai, “Following Her Following Her Passion: An Interview with Tina Takemoto, CinemQ (2019)

Kenji C. Liu, “Gaman: Topaz Concentration Camp, Utah,” Poem-a-Day, Academy of American Poets (October 17, 2019)

Soleil Ho, “Homoerotic Bread-Making on Full Display in Oakland,” San Francisco Chronicle (April 22, 2019)

Joey Orr and Imani Wadud, “Social Histories: An Inquiry from the Integrated Arts Research Initiative,” Art Journal Open (April 18, 2019)

Sara Radin, “Queer Stories Reign Supreme at the Oakland Museum of California,” Vice (March 22, 2019)

Alpesh Kantilal Patel, “Artistic Responses to Gaps in LGBTQI Archives: From World War II Asian America to Soviet Estonia” in Globalizing East European Art Histories: Past and Present, ed. Beata Hock and Anu Allas (Routledge, 2018), 202-215

Jan Christian Bernabe and Laura Kina, “Muscles, Mash Ups and Warning Shots–Queering Japanese American History: An Interview with Tina Takemoto,” Queering Contemporary Asian American Art, ed. Laura Kina and Jan Christian Bernabe (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2017), 220-226

Eureka at Thirty Years: Fleishhacker Foundation Artist Fellowships, foreword by Christian L. Frock, catalog (2017), 26-27

Roula Seikaly, “Recollected: Photography and the Archive,” HAF: Humble Arts Foundation (New Photography) (November 30, 2017)

Jennifer Gonzalez and Tina Takemoto, “Triple Threat: Queer Feminist of Color Performance Art,” Otherwise: Imagining Queer Feminist Art Histories, ed. Amelia Jones and Erin Silver (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2016), 294-303

Nia King, “Tina Takemoto,” Queer and Trans Artists of Color: Volume Two, ed. Elena Rose (2016)

Joe Nolan, “Art Review: ‘Loving After Lifetimes of All This’ at Asheville’s Center for Craft, Creativity and Design,” Burnaway (March 17, 2015)

Tina Takemoto, “Looking for Jiro Onuma: A Queer Meditation on the Incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II,” GLQ 20.3 (Duke University Press, 2014), 241-75  and cover art

Brian Hearn, “Loving After Lifetimes of All this at la Esquina,” Temporary Art Review (December 29, 2014)

Tina Takemoto, “Notes on Internment Camp,” Art Journal 72.2 (Summer 2013)

Lacey Jane Roberts, “Camp in the Camps: Tina Takemoto is Looking for Jiro,” Hyphen 25: Generation Issue (2012)

Lacey Jane Roberts, “Looking for Jiro: A Conversation with Tina Takemoto,” Hyphen 25, online exclusive (2012)

Tina Takemoto, “Looking for Jiro and Gentleman’s Gaman,” Radical Teacher 92 (2011) and cover art