Warning Shot
2016, 9:50 minutes
single-channel digital video with sound
One death. Three versions of the crime. James Wakasa was shot by military police at Topaz WWII incarceration camp. Was it justifiable homicide, an accidental fatality, or second-degree murder? This film uses the “Rashomon effect” to juxtapose conflicting accounts of this gay chef’s untimely demise. This speculative film uses the “Rashomon effect” to juxtapose conflicting accounts of this chef’s untimely demise.
Screenings
Both Legacy and Memorial: Japanese American Incarceration in the American West, University of Utah, 2024
Treize Galerie, Paris, 2023
10th Films of Remembrance, retrospective festival, 2021
Alphawood Gallery, Chicago, 2017
Frameline 41: San Francisco International LGBT Film Festival, 2017
MIX NYC: 29th New York Queer Experimental Film Festival, 2017
Films of Remembrance, San Francisco, 2016
CAAMFest 34, San Jose, 2016
12th Queer Women of Color Film Festival, San Francisco, 2016
Outtakes Two, San Francisco, (work-in-progress screening), 2015
Exhibitions
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
We Live! Memories of Resistance, OXY Arts Gallery, 2020
Resisting Incarceration Culture, Oliver Arts Center, 2019
Artist’s Eyes, Art of Incarceration, MIS Historic Learning Center Gallery, 2017
Press / Publications
Machiko Harada, “Japanese Diasporic Artists Take on Intergenerational Trauma,” Hyperallergic (February 22, 2024)
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
Joey Orr and Imani Wadud, “Social Histories: An Inquiry from the Integrated Arts Research Initiative,” Art Journal Open (April 18, 2019)
Artists’ Eyes: Art of Incarceration, (National Japanese American Historical Society 2017) exhibition catalog
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, (2017) catalog