Review: “The Dog Show”

In Hiromi Stringer’s latest exhibit, “The Dog Show: Time Traveler Umeyama’s Drawings From the 21st Century,” the Japanese-born and San Antonio-based artist imaginatively expresses her own experiences as someone bearing witness to a foreign land. She also presents an elaborate love letter to dogs.

“It was almost 30 years ago, one steamy, hot summer day, when I saw someone walking a Siberian Husky dog on a busy street in Bangkok, Thailand,” she begins in the show’s notes. “It was when the word globalization started to appear here and there. Why a Siberian anything in Thailand?”

Stringer (unsurprisingly a devoted canine lover in her personal life) developed the idea for her show after learning that dog breeds are a relatively new concept. Breeds stood out to her as indicative of contemporary culture, laying bare our modern desires and ambitions. By adopting a fictional persona, she presents insightful commentary on the many absurdities of modern life in America and asks us to consider a novel perspective.

“I want to know about the world I live,” she adds. “I came to this foreign country, the US, when I was in my 30s. A personal paradigm shift including cultural and language differences strengthened my curiosity of wanting to make sense of this place. Mundane quotidian objects of our times surely inform us about our current existence. Both events and ‘stuff’ in our lives have root causes or reasons. My approach is using the mundane as an extension of the broader world.”

Stringer carries out this examination of the mundane by transforming grayDUCK Gallery into the fantastical Umeyama Time Teleportation Museum. UTTM’s mission is to present the research of Stringer’s alter ego, Shoei Umeyama, a scholar from 19th-century Japan who is one of the world’s first teleporters, a predicament that was introduced to him in his late 30s.

The official museum brochure details the peculiar circumstances that led to Umeyama creating his rich collection of time travel drawings. Living in Japan at a time when the country was under government-enforced national isolation, he regularly found himself transported to completely random points in time. In the face of these jarring changes, the academic in him naturally felt inclined to record his observations of these strange new worlds. Umeyama’s field notes of his time in South Texas in the 21st century make up this specific exhibit, inviting us viewers to look at our environment from his vantage point.

Umeyama focused on studying dogs during his time in Texas. Lining the walls of UTTM are Umeyama’s documentation of his encounters with different breeds in curious scenes. Using paint on rice paper, he captures puppies riding in strollers, little dogs in Hello Kitty jackets, and even a cat wearing a leash. Each piece is also marked by Umeyama’s notes, written in Japanese, adding to the mystery for non-Japanese speakers.

Of course, underlying the entire show is a profound adoration for canines and the companionship they offer. The serious pretenses under which we are asked to examine dogs and dog-related artifacts are both hilarious and eye-opening. Teasing yet not scornful, the body of work presents a lighthearted, timely, and loving look at the ridiculous-looking gremlins we seem to take everywhere and dress up in human clothing. As the audience, we can walk away a bit more inquisitive about what we consider to be normal, and how that status quo came to be.

This article appears in Gift Guide 2023.