Bruce Yonemoto

During nearly half a century of living in Los Angeles, Bruce Yonemoto has created a body of work that blends cinematic language with critical reflections on media, memory, and history. In the 1970s he moved to Los Angeles from the Bay Area to join his brother Norman, an aspiring Hollywood director. Working both together and independently until Norman’s death in 2014, they developed a practice centered on experimental film. In the late 1980s the brothers began exploring their family’s history of incarceration during World War II. This research informs Bruce’s Broken Fences (2025), a diptych video installation that juxtaposes US War Relocation Authority propaganda films with Nazi footage of the Theresienstadt concentration camp—both falsely depicting camps as ordinary and even idyllic. The monitors are partially obscured by open-board fences treated with lacquer, a material long associated with Asian decorative arts and identity. Yonemoto’s broader practice similarly navigates myth and memory. In 2017 he embarked on a collaboration with Eder Santos, a Brazilian multimedia artist, to create a self-reflexive homage to Glauber Rocha’s film Barravento (1962), a cornerstone of the Brazilian Cinema Novo movement. In response to this, Yonemoto’s two-channel video installation Barravento Novo (2017) juxtaposes selections from Rocha’s analog 35mm film with a new digital 4K video, overlaying two historical moments and modes of technology. Like much of Yonemoto’s production, Barravento Novo points outside itself, occupying a place between fiction and documentation, myth and reality.

Bruce Yonemoto was born in 1949 in San Jose. A pioneer in the field of video art, over the last half century Yonemoto has produced a formally and thematically eclectic body of film, video, photography, and sculpture. Selected solo and two-person presentations include Kunstverein in Hamburg (2023); O-Town House, Los Angeles (2022,2023); Anthology Film Archives, New York (2022); Tate Modern, London (2017, 2012); Imperial Palace, Rio de Janeiro (2017); Museum of Modern Art, New York (2017); The Luckman, California State University, Los Angeles (2017); Hong-Gah Museum, Taipei, Tawain (2015); c.nichols Project, Los Angeles (2016); Art Gallery, Kanazawa College of Art, Ishikawa, Japan (2012); LAXART, Los Angeles (2011); Saint Louis Art Museum (2010); Convento de Santo Domingo, Qorikancha, Cusco, Peru (2006); MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge, MA (2001); Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia (2001); ICC Intercommunication Center, Tokyo (1999); Japanese American National Museum, Los Angeles (1999); and the Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, OH (1997). Selected group exhibitions include the Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2024); Institute of Contemporary Art, San Jose (2024); Galerie Quynh Contemporary Art, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam (2023); Yuz Museum, Shanghai (2020); Los Angeles County Museum of Art (2020); Qatar Museums, Doha, U.A.E. (2020); Chi-Wen Gallery, Taipei, Taiwan (2018, 2017); Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (2014); Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (2014); Centre Pompidou, Paris (2014); MoMA PS1, Queens, NY (2014); Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2014, 2011); and the Museum of Modern Art, New York (2011). Honors and awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship (2022); a Rockefeller Foundation Intercultural Film / Video / Multimedia Fellowship (1998); and a Maya Deren Award from the American Film Institute (1993). He earned a BA from the University of California, Berkeley (1972), and an MFA from Otis College of Art and Design, Los Angeles (1979).