Bruce Yonemoto

Bruce Yonemoto’s work as a video and media installation artist began in the mid-1970s. His body of single-channel video work (many in collaboration with his brother Norman), created from 1976 to the late 1980s, examined the effects of the mass media on our perceptions of personal identity (sexual, ethnic, and political), romantic love, melodrama and soap operas, TV commercials, and the electronic metatext (the ultimate products of Hollywood’s search for audience identification and manipulation), seeking to manipulate audiences while simultaneously making them aware of that manipulation.

He has been honored with numerous awards and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the American Film Institute, The Rockefeller Foundation, and the Maya Deren Award for Experimental Film and Video. Most recently, Yonemoto’s solo installations, photographs and sculptures have been featured in major solo exhibitions at the ICC in Tokyo, the ICA in Philadelphia, and the Kemper Museum in Kansas City. Yonemoto has been honored with retrospectives at the Japanese American National Museum (1999), Hong-Gah Museum in Taiwan (2015), Tate Modern (2017), and Anthology Film Archives in New York (2022). Since the early 1990s, Yonemoto’s solo work has explored experimental cinema and video art within the context of installation, photography and sculpture. He has continually been a strong proponent of the integration of fine arts and media. Recently, Yonemoto has pursued international productions, exhibitions and peer-reviewed residencies, focusing on postcolonial remnants embedded in popular cultural forms. His present interests include the creation of media artworks in collaboration with performance and conceptually based media artists in the US and Asia.