TAEKO, Tomiyama b. Japan

Tomiyama Taeko was a visual artist born in Kobe, Japan, in 1921. After living as a young woman in Manchuko, a puppet state of the Japanese empire, and briefly studying art in Tokyo, Taeko created works in various media to tell the stories of Japan’s marginalized groups, reckon with Japan’s history of colonization, and address other sociopolitical issues of east Asia. From the 1980s onward, her work incorporated indigenous Asian mythology to critique Euro-American-centric values in modernism. A Tale of Sea Wanderers ties together threads of her previous works, ambitiously tackling imperialism, environmentalism, capitalism, traditional folklore, and transnational history in a single series of paintings and mixed media collage. Taeko died in 2021 in Tokoyo, Japan. Her work has been exhibited globally in Japan, South Korea, and the United States.