This single gallery exhibition features two video works and two complementary series of small handmade objects and works on paper by San Francisco Bay Area-based artist TT Takemoto. Takemoto’s videos Looking for Jiro (2011) and On the Line (2018) uniquely center queer experiences of intimacy in prewar and WWII contexts. The Gentleman’s Gaman series (2009–23) and an installation of handcrafted kokeshi dolls (2023) offer sculptural, expanded modes of engagement with challenging and overlooked narratives in Asian American history, as reimagined by Takemoto.

Takemoto’s video Looking for Jiro, a mashup of drag king performance, US war propaganda footage and body building footage, and the associated Gentleman’s Gaman series are a tribute to Jiro Onuma, a gay Japanese American man incarcerated during WWII who worked in the mess hall and had a penchant for muscle men. On the Line, a meditation on Japanese American female cannery workers in prewar San Diego, is inspired by Isa Shimoda, whose restaurant is imagined by the artist as a space for same-sex intimacy among the women workers while the fishermen were out to sea. A sculptural installation of glass and polished earth figures iterates on the form of Japanese kokeshi dolls that appear in the video and serves as a metaphor for the lives haunted by the trauma of incarceration. The moving themes and material experimentation of Takemoto’s work highlight the tactile and sensory dimensions of queer Asian American histories and their ancestral legacies—real and imagined.

We gratefully acknowledge sustained support for TT Takemoto: Remembering in the Absence of Memory provided by The Hockwald Fund and the Robert Mondavi Family Fund at the Cantor Arts Center.

IMAGE: TT Takemoto (American), Looking for Jiro, 2011. Single-channel digital video with sound: performance, found footage; 5:45 min. © TT Takemoto. Courtesy of the artist and Catharine Clark Gallery, San Francisco. Photograph by Maxwell Leung

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