My Fate is in Your Hand: Revealing Yasuo Kuniyoshi’s Conflicted Identity

Abstract

Yasuo Kuniyoshi (1889-1953) was a Japanese-American émigré artist active and successful in the United States from the mid-1920s until his death. However, despite his artistic achievement and integration into American culture, Kuniyoshi’s life and fate turned tragic as the Pacific War erupted, which intensified extreme racism toward the people of Japanese heritage and increased nationalism in the United States. Kuniyoshi’s 1950 painting My Fate is in Your Hand reveals the artist’s dual and conflicted identity, his social and political fate in the U.S. after Pearl Harbor, and suggests that a year before his death, the artist no longer controlled his fate. A majority of white Americans and the conservative American art world rejected him as an Asian “other.” Kuniyoshi grew weary, stressed, and anxious, an artist caught between success and rejection and his split Japanese and American identity. In this essay, I argue that each major portion of the work’s title— “My,” “Fate,” and “Your Hand”— reveals the symbolic meaning of the painting and suggests the artist’s inner state in 1950. I also analyze four of Kuniyoshi’s earlier works to provide insight into the meaning of My Fate is in Your Hand and to tell the story of the Japanese-American artist.