Clement Hanami
2000
   
 
         

Hatfields and McCoys or It's A White Sale, 1996
Installation

Clement Hanami is a third-generation Japanese American who grew up in the Boyle Heights area of East L.A., where Japanese Americans and Latinos lived side by side. Hanami's mother, an atomic bomb survivor, raised her son with traditional Japanese values while herself struggling to adapt to this country's very different way of life. Hanami recalls watching World War II movies on television as a boy, and rooting for the Americans as the "good guys." As an adult, he began to see such polarities as far more complex than he'd realized. "Fat Man and Little Boy," Hanami's 1998 solo exhibition at the Los Angeles Center for Photographic Studies, explored these contradictions through installations consisting of various fake laboratory experiments that purportedly studied the effects of atomic radiation on the DNA of a fruit fly. The cool, distanced scientific discourse of Hanami's installation contrasted sharply with the horrors wrought by such technology.

Language effaces history just as effectively as it conveys it, Hanami's works suggest, and through his ongoing studies of media (particularly television and movie images) and their impact on society, he attempts to disengage us from their claims of truth and universality in favor of a critically engaged and multi-perspectival view. Most recently, Hanami has co-organized the collaborative Arts Partnership project "Finding Family Stories" and co-designed the exhibit "Common Ground: The Heart of Community" with Adobe L.A. for the Japanese American National Museum Pavilion. He is Production Manager at the Japanese American National Museum and received his M.F.A. in Art, New Genres, in 1992 and B.A. in Fine Arts in June 1998, both from UCLA.

Common Ground, 1999
Exhibit Installation