Ushio Shinohara (篠原 有司男, Shinohara Ushio, born January 17, 1932), nicknamed “Gyū-chan”, is a Japanese contemporary painter, sculptor, and performance artist based in New York City. Best known for his vigorously painted, large-scale and dynamic Boxing Painting series, Shinohara makes use of embodied gestures, appropriation and assemblage, iconographies of mass culture and traditional arts, and vivid tones in his diverse, multidisciplinary practice.
A founding member of the short-lived, avant-garde collective Neo-Dada Organizers, Shinohara spent the early years of his life in Tokyo before moving to New York City in 1969, where he continues to live and work. Having grown up in Japan through a time of rapid political change, social upheaval, and increasing Americanization and modernization in the wake of the American occupation, Shinohara's work was shaped by and responsive to the clashing forces in his midst. His energetic confrontations with conventions of both traditional and contemporary artistic canons are filtered through a pop sensibility and an understanding of art-making as a series of ephemeral gestures rather than a results-based process.
His work has been exhibited internationally at institutions including the Hara Museum of Contemporary Art, Centre Georges Pompidou, the Guggenheim Museum SoHo, National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo, National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto, Leo Castelli Gallery, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles and the Japan Society. Shinohara and his wife, Noriko, are the subjects of a documentary film by Zachary Heinzerling called Cutie and the Boxer (2013).
Early life and education Ushio Shinohara was born on January 17, 1932, in the Kōjimachi neighborhood of central Tokyo. His father was a tanka poet who was taught by Wakayama Bokusui, and his mother was a Nihonga painter and doll-maker who studied at the Private Women's School of Fine Arts (present-day Joshibi University of Art and Design) in Tokyo.
Shinohara attended Bancho Elementary School and Azabu Junior and Senior High School, and in 1952, enrolled in Tokyo Art University (known today as the Tokyo University of the Arts), where he studied yōga under the renowned painter Takeshi Hayashi. His classmates included Tetsumi Kudō, Jirō Takamatsu, and Natsuyuki Nakanishi, who would become fellow members of the Neo-Dada Organizers. Dissatisfied with the school's teaching, Shinohara quit the school in 1957 without completing his degree.
Career
Neo-Dada Organizers
Having grown up in the wake of World War II and the subsequent American Occupation, Shinohara's early work was keenly responsive to the conditions of postwar urban reconstruction, the crisis of reinterpreting tradition, and the pervasive and alluring presence of American mass media and consumer culture.
In 1955, Shinohara began submitting artworks to the unjuried, avant-garde Yomiuri Indépendant Exhibition and continued to participate in almost every iteration of the annual fair through 1963. Sponsored by the Yomiuri Shimbun newspaper, this freewheeling exhibition was unjuried and open to anyone, and thus became a site of artistic experimentation that paved the way for new forms of "anti-art," "non-art," and "junk art."
As there were few art dealers, collectors, and established galleries in Japan at the time, artist-organized group exhibitions and media-sponsored shows were the most popular platform for displaying and engaging with avant-garde, contemporary art. Shinohara was keenly conscious of his public image and sought to craft a persona through media portrayals, persuading the Weekly Sankei to feature him as a (self-dubbed) "rockabilly painter".
In March 1958, Shinohara paid a visit to Masunobu Yoshimura's newly built studio-residence in Shinjuku, an open plan space with large glass doors and white mortar finish designed by Arata Isozaki. Struck by the potentials of the modern and open interior, Shinohara declared, "I can do something here!" The studio atrium became the site of regular meetings of the Neo-Dada Organizers, the short-lived artistic collective formed in 1960 between Shinohara, Yoshimura, and other young artists who had been displaying artworks at the Yomiuri Indépendant, including Genpei Akasegawa, Shūsaku Arakawa, and Testumi Kudo.
The Neo-Dada Organizers held three official exhibitions in 1960, as well as a number of bizarre "actions," "events," and "happenings" in which they sought to mock, deconstruct, and in many cases, physically destroy conventional forms of art. Examples included filling galleries with piles of garbage, smashing furniture to the beat of jazz music, and prancing the streets of Tokyo in various states of dress and undress. Using the human body as their medium of art, their violent performances reflected both their dissatisfaction with the restrictive environment of the Japanese art world at the time, as well as contemporary social developments, most notably the massive 1960 Anpo protests against the U.S.-Japan Security Treaty.
Shinohara was instrumental in shaping the group's orientation around what Akasegawa would later term "creative destruction." In June 1960, at the height of the Anpo protests, Shinohara penned the short statement the group deemed its "manifesto," writing as follows:
Driven by a heedless energy to resist, provoke, indulge, and produce scandal and awe, the Neo-Dada Organizers were not rooted in the theoretical or political so much as the intuitive and instinctual dimensions of making and exhibiting art. Shinohara's works as part of the collective, such as Cheerful Fourth Dimension (Gokigenna 4-jigen) and Thunder Sculpture (Kaminari chokoku), used massive amounts of store-bought balloons, bamboo poles, nails, and other generic materials to produce destructive performances that indulged in the pleasures of excess and spectacle. Shinohara was also keenly aware of the artistic value of self-promotion and immediacy in the age of mass media, and walked around the streets of Ginza with exhibition announcements plastered across his body, in an act that blurred the division between performance and publicity.
Boxing Painting At a Neo-Dada event in September 1960 titled Bizarre Assembly, Shinohara, wearing his trademark mohawk hairstyle, performed his now-famous "boxing painting," punching a large piece of paper with boxing gloves that had been dipped in ink numerous times in succession. Shinohara's action painting practice began around this time, drawing from contemporary precedents in gestural abstraction while simultaneously insisting that the action, not the resulting painting, should constitute the artwork itself. Keenly conscious of his public persona, Shinohara accepted media requests from magazines, newspapers, and filmmakers to capture his art-making process. In 1960, novelist Kenzaburō Ōe was commissioned to write a feature on Japanese Beats by Mainichi Graph, which featured Shinohara performing an action painting using sumi ink, kraft paper, and rags wrapped around his wrists.
In 1961, renowned photographer William Klein captured Shinohara's "boxing painting" on film, publishing the photos in his famed 1964 collection Tokyo. Klein's photographs are some of the few records of Shinohara's performances, and the work of the Neo-Dada group more broadly, as their unconventional materials and transient actions defied archival practices. Their artworks were rarely taken seriously by critics, who merely saw the artists as vulgar, spoiled, anti-intellectual boys indulging in anti-establishment play.
Post Neo-Dada
Oiran In 1965, Shinohara began his Oiran series. The title refers to the high-ranking courtesans from the Edo period, and the works were particularly informed by the famed muzan-e ("atrocity prints") series Twenty-Eight Famous Murders with Verse (1866–7) by Tsukioka Yoshitoshi. Shinohara drew from the recognizable conventions of the genre while simultaneously combining these violent scenes with images of disaster from the Vietnam War culled from mass media, deconstructing form, and using fluorescent, flat swaths of color and garish patterns that aligned with Pop art sensibilities. Works from the series were featured in a solo exhibition, Doll Festival (Hinamatsuri), at Tokyo Gallery in February 1966, one of the few commercial galleries focused on contemporary art at the time. The exhibit was timed to coincide with the Hinamatsuri holiday on March 3, and subverted, along with the oiran, other motifs of classical Japanese femininity and traditional Japan. For the installation, Shinohara created life-size hina dolls out of aluminum, adorning the empress figure with several gaudy kanzashi to conflate her identity with an oiran, and transforming the emperor into an unsettling machine, whose head would spin rapidly and emit loud noise when a switch was turned on.
The motif of the oiran continues to appear throughout his other works, notably as riders in his Motorcycle Sculpture series.
Imitation Art Shinohara was fascinated by Pop art and its appropriation of American visual culture, and found himself drawn to its strategies of appropriation, declaring that "the first to imitate will win." He began to copy the works of Robert Rauschenberg, George Segal, Jasper Johns, and other American artists. Drink More (1964) (originally titled Lovely, lovely America) features a plaster hand holding a bottle of Coca-Cola, emerging from a backdrop of a bright orange and yellow American flag that serves as a direct quotation of Johns' signature motif. Upon visiting Shinohara's studio in the early 1960s, Johns, taken with the series, took one of the pieces back home with him. In 1965, Johns used the work as a basis for a flag painting rendered in bright orange and green, maintaining the cycle of imitation and re-appropriation that formed the conceptual bedrock of Pop.
As Hiroko Ikegami argues, Shinohara's gestures not only critiqued Western conventions of originality and authorship by re-inscribing the same strategies of reproduction, but called attention to the ideological crisis of Japanese modern art, as a mode that was contingent on originality and difference, yet simultaneously was reliant on precedents borrowed from Euro-American modernism.
New York (1969-present) In 1969, Shinohara relocated to New York City, originally on a one-year scholarship from the John D. Rockefeller III Fund. After a stay at the Hotel Chelsea, he moved to fellow artist Ay-O's loft in Chinatown, located in a building occupied by several Fluxus artists including Nam June Paik. Charmed by the gritty energy of the city, the liberatory potential of working in the States, and the city's art scene, he secured a green card in 1970 and remained in the city, where he continues to live to work to this day.
Motorcycle Sculptures Shinohara began his ongoing Motorcycle Sculptures series in 1972, a project in part inspired by the Hells Angels bikers he observed around downtown Manhattan. The artist was taken by the motorcyclists’ rugged machismo, their disregard for traffic lights and convention, and the violent energy they exuded—qualities he associated with a sort of American spirit not found in Japan at the time. Shinohara also recalls having watched the 1953 Marlon Brando film The Wild One while in Japan, and cites it as another source of inspiration.