Background

Ushio Shinohara was born in 1932 in Tokyo, Japan. He is a son of tanka poet, and nihonga painter and doll maker.

Education

Coming from an artistic family, Ushio Shinohara developed an interest in the art of Cézanne, Van Gogh and Gauguin in his childhood.

Shinohara entered Tokyo University of the Arts in 1952. After five years of studies in oil painting, he left university unsatisfied by the conventional approach to the program. Since then, he pursued his studies in art himself exploring avant-garde and international criticism.

Career

Ushio Shinohara's career began with the Yomiuri Independent Exhibition in which he began to participate in the early 1960s. Through this anti-salon event, he came across Akasegawa Genpei, Shusaku Arakawa, and Yoshimura Masanobu who soon became his fellows in Neo-Dada Organizers group.

The first series that pushed Shinohara to prominence was boxing paintings where he used the boxing gloves as paintbrushes. By the middle of the decade, inspired by the Edo-period woodprints and the elements of American Pop Art, he produced Oiran series which were presented at his first solo exhibition Doll Festival at the Tokyo Gallery in 1966.

Due to the scholarship that Ushio Shinohara received from the John D. Rockefeller 3rd Fund the following year, he made his first trip to New York City. Intended to be a one-year visit, it became the artist’s all-year residence. Shinohara was so captivated by the aesthetics of American culture with its comics and the urge for freedom that he decided not to return to his homeland. Shinohara's fascination with the country was reflected in his next series of works, Motorcycle Sculptures.

The artist’s personal exhibition, Tokyo Bazooka, held in 1982 Japan Society in New York City was quite an unconventional event for the society's traditional supporters but caused a strong reaction from the part of art critics.

The artist came back to his early boxing paintings by the 1990s turning them into a kind of performance, often in the form of battles against his fellows.

Ushio Shinohara has regularly exhibited nationally and internationally, including Tate Modern, the Centre Pompidou, the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo, Japan Society, and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art among others.

Achievements

• 

  Ushio Shinohara is considered one of the innovators and pioneers of post-war art in Japan. A co-founder of one of the most avant-garde groups of the time in the country, Dadaism Organizers Group, he was the first who elaborated boxing painting turning it into the performance.
  
  Shinohara has been a recipient of the prize from the William and Norma Copley Foundation and the Mainichi Art Prize.
  
  His artworks are acquired by the permanent collection of such art galleries as the Museum of Modern Art, New York City, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Hara Museum of Contemporary Art, and Hyogo Prefectural Museum of Art.
  
  In 2018, Jirocho in New York by Ushio Shinohara was purchased at SBI Art Auction for $56,283.

Works

More photos

• artwork

  • Drink More

• painting

  • Yellow Iris

  • Pumpkin Flowers

  • Winter Sky

  • Prince of Genji

  • Trapeze Artists

  • Hydrangea

  • Iris

  • Sandpiper

  • March

  • Napoli

  • Cupcake Party

  • Purple and Pink on Yellow and White

  • Boxing Painting

  • Roar

  • Coca Cola Plan

  • Yojinbo

• sculpture

  • Ashura

  • Wonder Woman Motorcycle

Views

Quotations: "I become happy, sad, and emotional when I read or watch what happened in the world in the papers and on TV. I think of how my artistic expression can help this chaotic world. I consider myself to be a Japanese, especially in the multiethnic city, New York."

Interests

• Hollywood culture, jazz culture, comic books

• Artists

  Paul Cézanne, Vincent van Gogh, Paul Gauguin, Shōmei Tōmatsu

Connections

Ushio Shinohara married an artist Noriko Shinohara at the beginning of the 1970s. The family produced a son named Alexander Kūkai Shinohara. He followed his parents’ steps and became an artist.

Shinohara has two children from a previous marriage.

Wife:

Noriko Shinohara

Son:

Alexander Kkai

colleague:

Genpei Akasegawa

colleague:

Shusaku Arakawa

References

• Shinohara Pops! The book surveys the career of the avant-garde artist.
  2012