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
Queer East Festival, Barbican, London, 2024
Both Legacy and Memorial: Japanese American Incarceration in the American West, University of Utah, 2024
I Hear a New World: Deconstructing the Musical, SF Cinematheque, San Francisco, 2024
Kunstmuseum Celle Mit Sammlung Robert Simon, Celle, Germany, 2023
Cinemama Reel Queer Flix, Oakland, 2023
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
Rhythmic Vibrations, American Pavilion, Gwangju Biennale, South Korea, 2024
TT Takemoto: Remembering in the Absence of Memory, Cantor Arts Center, solo exhibition, 2024
Reimagine Peace, No Matter How Long the Path, online exhibition for Hyperallergic, 2024
Never Again is Now: Japanese American Women Activists and the Legacy of the Mass Incarceration, Eloise Pickard Smith Gallery, Santa Cruz, 2023
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
Machiko Harada, “Japanese Diasporic Artists Take on Intergenerational Trauma,” Hyperallergic (February 22, 2024)
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: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 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