My Fate is in Your Hand

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. Scholarly Literature Review Section: My argument is unique and original because there has not been any substantial research on or analysis of Kuniyoshi’s My Fate is in Your Hand. Since the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art owns and displays this work, I had the opportunity to work hands-on with the painting and develop an original reading of the work. The main secondary sources on which I grounded my research were Tom Wolf’s The Artistic Journey of Yasuo Kuniyoshi (2015) and ShiPu Wang’s Becoming American?: The Art and Identity Crisis of Yasuo Kuniyoshi (2011). Wolf’s book served as an introduction to and survey of Kuniyoshi’s career. Wang’s research focused on the artist’s “identity crisis” in the U.S. during World War II, the time period on which my research focuses. Yasuo Kuniyoshi’s memoir Yasuo Kuniyoshi served as my primary source in developing my argument and provided Kuniyoshi a voice in my essay. Through these secondary and primary sources, I came to a fresh analysis of Kuniyoshi’s My Fate in Your Hand that expands beyond the image to tell the story of Kuniyoshi’s conflicted identity. asuo Kuniyoshi’s 1950 painting My Fate is in Your Hand reflects Kuniyoshi’s lifelong journey as a JapaneseAmerican artist in the United States. Although Kuniyoshi achieved fame in the United States as an artist, My Fate is in Your Hand reveals Kuniyoshi’s life as an outsider in his own country due to his Japanese appearance and heritage. Ripe with symbolism, acidic color, and fragmentation, his painting captures the contradiction and conflict that troubled Kuniyoshi’s life and career. Despite Kuniyoshi’s artistic training in the United States, his success in the Y