Yoshiko Shimada and BuBu de la Madeleine

A square black-and-white photograph depicts a pair posing in male drag within a hot pink, heart-shaped fabric frame trimmed by white frills. This gesture sets the tone for Japanese performance artists Yoshiko Shimada and BuBu de la Madeleine’s genre-bending collaborative work: relentless and unapologetic about queering heteronormative representations of the masculinist power and military violence that resulted in the creation of “pan-pan”—Japanese women subjected to prostitution during the American occupation of Japan after World War II. Far from the “exotic” seductress roles Asian women were compelled to adopt in these coerced sexual practices, the artists chose to embody American General MacArthur (Yoshiko) and Japanese Emperor Hirohito (BuBu) during their infamous 1945 encounter that sealed the fate of Imperial Japan as another American-controlled make-believe democracy. The impersonation, as striking as it is irreverent, seemed to suggest that Japan’s rendition to the United States was equivalent to prostitution to foreigners.

Formal strategies of distantiation and appropriation allude to the irreconcilable and unreconciled nature of false gender dichotomies, real war traumas and historical disenactment as suggested by the splintering of the year 1945 while the wholesomeness of their enactment is restored with the year of the work’s making (1998) and its unabashed political captioning “Made in Occupied Japan.”

Having graduated from art academy and liberal art college in the 1980s, BuBu in Japan and Yoshiko in the United States, the former becoming the star of the Dumb Type artist collective, an active performance artist and sex worker activist, the latter a feminist artist, they made the limitations of a binary vision evident in their collective practice. With 1945, these artists imply that “heartening the square” might be just as impossible as squaring the circle.

Text: Claire Tancons