Whether showcasing clay tablets on gallery walls or presenting sculpture in the round, Barbara Hashimoto's works explore the structures and strategies of power. Surveying a wide array of contexts, she studied Japanese manga images, Hindu moral storybooks, and, more recently, the European tales of Shakespeare and Zola. Defining a circuit of exchange between East and West, between so-called low and high culture, her works deconstruct both popular and historically respected voices, pointing to their patriarchal paradigms and whispering of both the failure and dream for a greater democratization of social power.

The artistic journey of the Yale-educated American began while she was living in Tokyo in 1988. Traveling home by subway one evening, she idly picked up a manga comic book left behind by another passenger. Opening it suddenly found herself face to face with the demimonde of Japanese pornographic mangas. Distrurbed, she took the book home and threw it into a kiln, hoping to destroy it. But the next day, she found its pages permanently etched onto the surfaces of clay works simultaneously being fired.

— SCULPTURE Magazine, Vol. 20 No. 8 | Barbara Hashimoto’s Critique of Power | Collette Chattopadhyay (excerpt)