UC Santa Cruz

This dissertation analyzes three projects by artist TT Takemoto: "Looking for Jiro" (2011), "Semiotics of Sab" (2016), and "Ever Wanting (for Margaret Chung)" (2021). Each chapter parses the distinct visual vocabularies and methodologies created by Takemoto for the artworks in relation to Jiro Onuma (1904-1990), Sab Shimono (b. 1937), and Margaret Chung (1889-1959). In chapter one, I explore how "Looking for Jiro" takes up Japanese American incarceration and queer sexuality with artistic methods based in performance and film. I contend that within the slippages of queer failure, "Looking for Jiro" sutures these histories from the past to create relationality with the present and future. Chapter two examines how "Semiotics of Sab" takes up visual and aural stereotyping perpetuated by Hollywood films by drawing from the film archive of gay Asian American actor, Sab Shimono. In conversation with genre-shaping methods from structuralist and feminist experimental film, the chapter shows how "Semiotics of Sab" offers a queer and Asian American intervention to grapple with stereotyping in the US. Lastly, in the final chapter, I discuss "Ever Wanting (for Margaret Chung)" to explore the implicit policing of identity as tied to homophobia and racism in the early twentieth century. The chapter shows how the artwork’s contrasting filmic techniques create a visual vocabulary that reflect the complexities of American heroism.

The analyses in this dissertation show how Takemoto’s methods have historical implications for US visual culture and art history. The past is an impetus for each project and the artworks deftly reveal the visual culture redactions and misrepresentations of queer Asian Americans and how those patterns persist in the present. Ultimately, I argue that Takemoto’s artworks critique US history, not to complete the picture, which is dynamic and incomplete, but to disrupt what exists and present space for asking questions of sedimented histories that are foundational to present US ideologies.