Lord It's The Samurai poster, 2009.

The latest offering from the Asian Art Museum, "Lords of the Samurai" featured more than 160 objects from the Hosokawa family collection and the Eisei-Bunko Museum in Tokyo, including suits of armor, calligraphy, paintings, tea wares, and musical instruments. The Museum's exhibition and catalogue focus on "Bushido", the samurai code based in the concepts of "bun and bu", or culture and arms. Entering the accompanying educational room, one can dress like a Samurai lord, write poetry, see Samurai movies, practice calligraphy, and drink tea. Such activities reduces the museum's staff best efforts at offering visitors genuine cultural context to playacting. "Damiyo for A Day" points to the empty language that reflects a cultural landscape formed by manipulated images and idioms.

In response to the exhibit, a guerilla artist collective has appropriated the museum's promotional material to create a website and poster parody entitled "Lord It's The Samurai." The collective adds Disney-like mouse ears and a human nose to a mysterious Samurai figure, as well as a mushroom cloud backdrop, to the official Asian Art Museum publicity. Found online at http://www.asiansart.org/samurai1.html and distributed around San Francisco, the project emphasizes the pervasiveness of the myth of Orientalism in our dominant culture. Herold Bolitho, a Professor of Japanese History at Harvard University, one of the alternative voices cited on the guerilla site, writes, "the samurai of the popular imagination is a myth. He never existed. You can see him in books... in films... in prints, plays, novels, and museums but you cannot see him in history, and that is what really matters."

This group of guerilla artists argues that the museum effectively aestheticizes violence by not providing any true historical context. In doing so, they have made incisive comic thrusts at the powers that be.

"The Lords of the Samurai" was on view at the Asian Art Museum through September 20, 2009. Lord It's The Samurai is an ongoing project found at http://www.asiansart.org/samurai1.html

Art Practical Issue 1 will include a full length version of this text.