Image: Oakland Museum of California
The Oakland Museum of California will present ‘BeHere / 1942: A New Lens on the Japanese American Incarceration’, an immersive exhibition by Japanese media artist Masaki Fujihata that reconsiders photographs made during the forced removal and incarceration of Japanese Americans in the Bay Area and Los Angeles during World War II. The exhibition will be on view in the museum’s Great Hall from Friday, September 18, through Sunday, December 27, 2026.
Fujihata’s project uses large-scale projections, video and augmented reality to examine how photographs shape memory, historical understanding and perception. Visitors will encounter enlarged and activated versions of archival images, moving between historical scenes and their present-day locations as photographs are mapped across the gallery and Oak Street Plaza.
The artist has spent years researching photographs by Dorothea Lange and Russell Lee, who documented the forced incarceration of Japanese Americans in the Bay Area and Los Angeles, respectively. The exhibition focuses attention not only on the people depicted, but also on the circumstances of image-making: the emotions visible in the photographs, the position of the photographer and the power relationship between the camera and its subjects. Fujihata describes his aim as being ‘to peer deeply into photographs…to derive from them more than was visible on the surface.’
The Oakland presentation includes new elements specific to the Bay Area. Among them are installations drawing on Lange’s 1942 photographs of San Francisco and Oakland, including images made near the site of what is now the Oakland Museum of California. Fujihata has also created a new three-screen video featuring local residents, including people with connections to the history of Japanese American incarceration and others affected by present-day anti-immigrant policies.
The exhibition extends beyond the museum’s interior. In Oak Street Plaza, a life-size image of Japanese Americans lined up to board buses forms the basis for an augmented-reality experience. Viewed through the AR app, buses and people appear layered over the plaza, bringing a 1942 scene into the contemporary Oakland setting. Other works draw on images including Lange’s photographs of evacuees’ baggage piled on an Oakland sidewalk, Japanese-owned businesses and Japanese Americans boarding buses for the Tanforan Assembly Center, as well as Lee’s photographs of forced removal in Los Angeles.
‘BeHere / 1942’ was originally developed by the Yanai Initiative for Globalizing Japanese Humanities at UCLA and Waseda University and presented at the Japanese American National Museum in 2022. The Oakland exhibition is organized by the Yanai Initiative and the Oakland Museum of California, in collaboration with the institutions involved in the project’s development. OMCA, located at 1000 Oak Street, presents exhibitions and collections devoted to California art, history and natural sciences.
The opening will coincide with a Friday Nights at OMCA programme on September 18 from 5 to 9 p.m. The free evening will include performances by Cal Raijin Taiko and Bay Area singer-songwriter Kiyomi, a set by DJ Dailo Mac, gallery chats and the museum’s annual Fall Teacher Night. The exhibition itself remains on view through December 27, 2026.
