Printmaker Falls ‘Between Two Worlds’

As art repositories wax evermore homogenized, Pasadena’s Pacific Asia Museum pleasantly goes its own way. Its latest exhibition, “Between Two Worlds: The Life and Art of Lilian May Miller,” resonates broadly through themes almost uncanny in their timeliness. The show is about nothing if not the ambiguities of identity.

It surveys the largely forgotten art of an American woman who became a Japanese artist. Born in Tokyo in 1895, she was a daughter of U.S. diplomat Ransford Miller. Dad, evidently disappointed in Lilian’s gender, promptly nicknamed her “Jack,” treating her like one of the guys. She absorbed his love of good clean athletic fun--hiking, swimming and hunting. The exhibition’s searching, sympathetic catalog essay by Asian art scholar Kendall Brown leaves little doubt that Miller was a lesbian, or was mainly attracted to women.

She also learned two Japanese languages, the spoken and the pictorial. Admitted to studies usually discouraged for Japanese females, Miller not only achieved decent mastery of drawing, she cut her own wood blocks and printed them. Even Japanese artists didn’t do that. In effect, she became an all-around Japanese poet and printmaker.

This happened to occur during the epoch of Japanese industrialization. Native artists consciously absorbed Occidental influence. Miller paradoxically became a foreign keeper of Japan’s dwindling tradition of fine craftsmanship.

When she was 14, Miller’s father was reassigned to Washington, D.C. She graduated high school there and went on to Vassar. Among her fellow students was the preciously liberated poet Edna St. Vincent Millay, whose preferred nickname was “Vincent.” Miller can be counted as a kindred member of the Lost Generation. It’s not hard to think of her life as a novel.

Classmates tended to think of her as Japanese. It must have all been a little confusing. Miller remained single, and when she wasn’t in kimono, she dressed as butch as custom allowed. Meantime, her father became consul general in Korea. After World War I, Lillian returned to Japan, sojourned in Korea, Honolulu and the States. She was fairly peripatetic.

Although cushioned by a relatively affluent family, she wanted to make a living with her art. Apparently she did pretty well and wasn’t embarrassed to make a distinction between salable pot-boilers and serious work. She built a helpful network of female professionals, journalists and art world figures including the pioneering Pasadena dealer in Native American and Asian art Grace Nicholson. She called Miller “Mickie.” Miller called Nicholson “Nickie.” An exhibition was arranged in April 1930.

As a re-creation of that event, the present show takes on special reverberations. Suddenly the Pacific Asia Museum’s wonderful old Imperial Palace architecture--originally Nicholson’s showplace and residence--is displaced 68 years back in time.

Co-curated by Brown and the museum’s Meher McArthur, the presentation includes touching archival photos of the artist and a display of her materials. Clearly the whole is, as advertised, as much about Miller’s life as her art. She was accomplished but hardly great. Much work is stiff and bottled-up. Pieces done in Korea, while unmistakably affectionate, seem to bow to Western expectations of quaintness.

Yet the work--mainly from the 1920s and ‘30s--has an eloquence that probably was unintended. “In a Korean Palace Garden” is a traditional ink scroll. Brushwork describing the bark of a tree betrays vibrations of cellular activity, as if energy constrained by the format is urgently trying to cut loose. It happens again in “Landscape With Waterfall.” The subject allowed Miller to go at it like an Abstract Expressionist. In “Rainbow Phoenix Waterfall,” an odd framing of the subject creates a latent image of a surreal monster.

Even in more controlled work, Miller sometimes breaks through the depersonalizing demands of custom. Three adjacent prints depict Mt. Fuji in moonlight. They’re identical except in color. Two are ordinary. The third, in blue, finds something heroic in maintaining icy distance.

Her single most moving graphic is “Korean Junks at Sunset.” A horizontal diptych in autumnal shades, it shows a fortified palace faded into a dusky silhouette. Sails grow faint with distance. The piece wafts an almost unbearable sense of longing for a disappearing world.

Miller was in the States ailing from jaundice and the aftermath of uterine cancer when Japan attacked Pearl Harbor. The artist, heartsick and bitter, turned her Asian expertise to producing anti-Japanese propaganda for the Navy. She died in 1943, at age 47.

* “Between Two Worlds: The Life and Art of Lilian May Miller,” Pacific Asia Museum, 46 N. Los Robles Ave., Pasadena, through Jan. 3, closed Mondays and Tuesdays, (818) 449-2742.