Bio

Rumi Tominaga is a culturally American, Japanese citizen who has called LA, NYC and Memphis her home before moving to Tokyo.  Since receiving her BFA (sculpture concentration) she has spent the past decade producing works by marginalized voices for film and television, creating a storytelling space that investigates feminism, the spectrum of LGBTQIA+ and immigration. 

Rumi’s interactions with storytellers across the world have further fueled her own artistic explorations of privilege, strength and vulnerability.  Rumi has identified as an immigrant girl in suburban Orange County (Japanglish at home), a queer social activist in NYC, a spouse to her transgender ex in Tokyo and currently an artist working through her accumulated points of view and location-based ideological shifts.  

Her materials, like her experiences, have shifted over the years: recycling industrial cables, wires and films for installations, welding discarded metals, painting with oils, inks and watercolors.  Currently ink and watercolor are her most preferred media— for they are as fluid and lightfast as her life experiences have been.

Statement

I cannot escape people.  Every day I can encounter over 3.5 million people at my local train station.  The hordes, the bodies, the sweat, the nerves, the steps.  And on a micro level, the eyes glued to the screens, the hands clutching, crossed, folded, holding, scratching, pushing, grabbing.  The glances— again eyes— not meeting each other until by accident when a cacophony breaks out and we can’t help but— oops meet someone’s gaze.    

I internalize all the people I see and absorb their masks, poses, gestures.  Who they are on the train is not who they are in their private sphere, even though we contain the same vitals, heartbeats, currents.  Our idiosyncrasies and cellular abnormalities make us more specific than human, more than our name, more than our label of sister mother grandfather war veteran photographer surgeon filmmaker zealot farmer programmer.

In my work, I paint the people I see and the people we are on the inside— our organs, our posturing and our outer masks.  My work is an abstracted reality with a smidge of surrealism and is executed in layers and textures: overlays of color, smooth focused images, rough patches of bokeh and repeated shapes that may become a pattern.  I piece, patch, bathe, outline again and again to get at the whole through their parts.