Mayumi Hamanaka

Mayumi Hamanaka is an Oakland based artist and communications manager at Kala Art Institute. She was born in Japan, where she studied Art History at the International Christian University in Tokyo. She received a B.F.A. from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1999 and an M.F.A. in photography from California College of the Arts in 2004.

She was awarded a Murphy Fellowship Award in 2003 as well as a residency at the Taiwan Artist Village in Taipei in 2005. Outside of the Bay Area, she has shown in Chicago, New York, Albuquerque, Tucson, and Taiwan. Mayumi currently resides in Oakland, where she is a lecturer at California College of the Arts.

 

History is a mysterious myth. Like novels by Haruki Murakami, by re-imagining the past, we come up with a more accurate picture of the present.

 

  

I wonder how we can make a connection between the past incidents happened elsewhere and the current ground where we stand on. As written in Night and Fog, all historical incidents might have happened at a certain time, in a certain place and by certain people. At the same time, those incidents may be repeated again at different time, in a different place and by different people. Among the photographs I found during my research, there are many images that I want to shield my eyes from. When I look at these images, I often question myself: what would I have done if I were living at that time. Could I have acted differently or would I have just followed the dynamics of the war and repeated the same mistake?

 

 

 

Mayumi’s past exhibitions at Swarm include Aboveground (2011), Things Are Expanding (2010), The Sum of Its Parts (2008), The Little Show (2008), and Somewhere in Space (2006).