Sights Unseen: The Photographic Constructions of Masumi Hayashi, May 31 - September 14, 2003

The Japanese American National Museum will present the first survey of the work by Japanese American photographer Masumi Hayashi in the exhibition Sights Unseen: The Photographic Constructions of Mayumi Hayashi, opening May 31, 2003. The exhibition includes 30 photographs that explore bucolic landscapes, and the unseen reality just below the surface. The photocollages come from five bodies of Hayashi’s work—abandoned prisons; Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Superfund Sites; Japanese American and Japanese Canadian World War II concentration camps; sacred sites in Japan, India, and Nepal; and portraits.

“Mayumi Hayashi’s photocollages explore the incongruity between appearance and reality in the American landscape, with technical precision and layered meanings,” says Karin Higa, Director of Curatorial and Exhibitions and Senior Curator of Art. “The Japanese American National Museum is pleased to present her work to the Los Angeles audience.”

Hayashi’s photographs of EPA Superfund Sites are an example of Hayashi’s early panoramic photographs that exhibit beauty and simplicity and, without overt commentary, explore the visible landscape and the hidden facts and histories of these sites. EPA Superfund Site 666 (1990) depicts a picturesque autumn landscape of blue skies and ethereal clouds reflected in a pool of water and only the title suggests something sinister. From 1950 to 1969, the quarry was used as a disposal site for acids and other chemicals, resulting in hazardous waste dump that required substantial federal funds to isolate and clean the contamination—one of more than 1,000 toxic waste sites identified by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).

In 1990, Hayashi began a decade-long project of photographing another subject whose history belies its true story—American and Canadian World War II concentration camps. Hayashi inaugurated her series of photographs at Gila River, Arizona—one of the ten concentration camps where over 120,000 Americans of Japanese ancestry were incarcerated from 1943 to 1946—and also the place of her birth. Her resulting photocollage, Gila River Relocation Camp, Foundations (1990), shows the concrete remains of foundations starkly set against a large expanse of sky and barren landscape. Hayashi went on to photograph the remaining American camps in Arizona, California, Utah, Wyoming, Colorado, and Arkansas, as well as Canadian Japanese relocation camps in Ontario and British Columbia.

Sights Unseen also includes the first exhibition of four photocollages from Hayashi’s more recent body of work, that of sacred sites. Hayashi captures the spiritual depth and atmospheric detail of places such as the River Ganges and the Bhutan Temple in India.

Masumi Hayashi’s panoramic photocollages include as many as 140 individual photographs, and as few as five. On location, Hayashi shoots the photographs beginning on the horizon line, moving her camera horizontally in a circular rotation. She then angles her camera upward and repeats the circular rotation, and then downward and repeats the process. The photographs are then assembled in Hayashi’s studio where, without submitting to a rigid framework, Hayashi plays with the images to create large-scale panoramas. The photocollages portray anywhere from a 100 degree to a 540 degree view of the interior space or landscape. By using multiple images, rather than a single photograph, Hayashi captures the complexity of her subjects. Higa comments, “Viewers must simultaneously process the individual component parts as they try to make sense of the vertiginous perspectives produced by the circular rotation.”

Masumi Hayashi

Masumi Hayashi was born in the Gila River, Arizona concentration camp in 1945 and raised in the Watts area of Los Angeles. Throughout her adolescence, she worked at her parents’ store, Village Market, on Compton Avenue. She graduated from Jordan High School and attended UCLA before marrying a naval officer during the Vietnam War. She frequently moved during this period and had a son while living in Guam.

Now professor of photography at Cleveland State University, Ohio, Hayashi received a Master of Fine Arts from Florida State University. Her work is included in the permanent collection of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), the Tokyo Museum of Photography, and the Victoria and Albert Museum of Art in London. She has an extensive exhibition history, including recent shows at the Cleveland Museum of Art; Ludwig Museum Koblenz, Germany; the Oregon Nikkei Legacy Center in Portland, Oregon; and the Visual Studies Workshop, Rochester, New York.

Hayashi was awarded a Fulbright Fellowship in 2003 for work in India and Nepal. In addition, she has received grants and fellowships from the Ohio Arts Council, the National Endowment for the Arts, Arts Midwest, Florida Arts Council, Cleveland Visual Arts Award, and a 1997 Civil Liberties Educational Fund research grant. Her photographs have been widely published in significant journals and magazines including DoubleTake, Aperture, See, and Mother Jones.

Support

Sights Unseen: The Photographic Constructions of Masumi Hayashi is generously supported by: Hisako Nerio Imamura & Akira Imamura, Members and Donors of the Japanese American National Museum. We gratefully acknowledge the following for support of the National Museum’s arts programming: Ford Foundation, The James Irvine Foundation, California Arts Council, Frank L. Ellsworth, Ph.D., Takashi & Lily Hori, Ray Inouye, J.A. & Y.A. Kanegaye, Robert & Akiko Moriguchi, Rafu Shimpo, Sachiko Watanabe, Frank H. Watase, Gordon T. Yamate & Deborah Shiba, D.D.S.

General Information

The Japanese American National Museum is located at 369 East First Street in the Little Tokyo Historic District of Los Angeles. For more information, call 213.625.0414. Museum hours are Sunday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday, and Saturday: 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. and Thursday 10 a.m. to 8 p.m. Museum admission is $6 for adults, $5 for seniors and $3 for students and children. Admission is free for Museum members and children under age five. Metered street parking and public parking lots are conveniently located near the Museum for a nominal fee.