Exhibition review: Portraits of Ryukyu

ABSTRACT The exhibition “Portraits of Ryukyu,” held at the Okinawa Prefectural Art Museum from November 2021 through January 2022, featured works by sixteen artists with close ties to Okinawa, highlighting the diversity of themes, approaches, styles, and media contained within the category of modern and contemporary Okinawan art, and expanding understandings of that canon. The fifteen women and one x-gender artist featured in the exhibition, some of whom were born and raised in Okinawa and some abroad, some with mixed ethnic backgrounds and others with Japanese backgrounds but trained and educated in Okinawa, address not only themes of gender, war, tradition, identity, and the ongoing U.S. military presence in the islands, but also of family, memory, modernity, labor, consumerism, and of historical and contemporary ties with the experiences of people in Taiwan, Vietnam, Hawai’i, and elsewhere.