Once the war ended and Japanese Americans were released, the family relocated to Northern California where their father worked as a carnation grower and plant pathogist.
[3] Growing up in the 1950s in Santa Clara, California, the two brothers were actively a part of the post-war idealism and the culture of movies and television shows.
Both brothers utilize Los Angeles as tool and backdrop for a number of projects, drawing particularly from the Hollywood veneer of glamour and romance.
Their first collaboration, Garage Sale (1976), was a 16 mm feature film about a young blond man named Hero and his wife drag queen Goldie Glitters.
As Goldie demands a divorce, Hero, in a frenzy to retain her love, encounters numerous characters – each with their own idiosyncrasies and their own definitions for success.
[8] Similar themes, clashing idea, and the juxtaposition and confusion of reality with fiction echo through their subsequent projects which assemble raw materials from their post-WWII youth and home videos with recognizable Hollywood and industry-inspired scenes, dialogues, and romances.
Their recent works include a 1993 collaboration with John Baldessari for the Santa Monica Museum of Art entitled Three Locations/Three Points of View, A Matter of Memory (1995) and Silicon Valley (1999).
The audience would encounter those Hollywood melodrama they could recall and popular television commercial messages, but in segmented pieces fabricated together, showing the repeated patterns the mass media supply daily.
[2] Norman born 1946, and Bruce 1948, they were honored with recognition in their mid-life at the exhibition Memory, Matter and Modern Romance at the Japanese American National Museum in Los Angeles, January 23 - July 4, 1999.