b'AFFECTED BY WAR: contextualizing M U N I O M AKU U C H IMARGO MACHIDAA S THE FIRST SOLO MUSEUM EXHIBITION devoted to Munio Makuuchi, Defiant Vision: Prints & Poetry by Munio Makuuchi makes an original contribution to the groundswell of scholarship and curatorial efforts dedicated to the pictorial lineage of Asian American artists whose distinctive work remains largely absent from the US historical canon. In Defiant Vision, curator Aprile Gallant gathers together an impressive array of graphic work by this maverick twentieth-century Japanese American artist and poet whose multifaceted visual practice spans printmaking, painting, and paper sculpture. The ambitious contextual recuperation and textured cross-readings by Gallant in collaboration with literary scholar Floyd Cheung invite significant critical attention to this long-neglected artist. They explore how Makuuchis expressive sensibility was shaped by early childhood confinement in a World War II internment camp and an extended odyssey that propelled him from his birthplace in Seattle across the United States, Africa, Europe, and Japan, before his untimely death in California in 2000. 1In contrast to the other commentators wider-ranging discussions, my focus is on socially engaged themes by Makuuchi that respond to the profound personal and familial impact of the World War II era on Americans of Japanese descent. For Makuuchi, alongside fellow Japanese Americans, these were extraordinarily traumatic years during which the sense of self, and the capacity to trust in the institutional power of government, were both severely eroded by the sudden escalation of anti-Japanese sentiment, the loss of homes and property, difficult years of mass incarceration, and the first use of the atomic bomb on civilians in Japan. Hence Makuuchi is positioned within a comparative framework, to broadly align his work with kindred imagery by Yasuo Kuniyoshi, Jimmy Tsutomu Mirikitani, Roger Shimomura, and Tom Nakashima. Excepting Kuniyoshi, these Atom & Ev CHECKLIST #4129'