Ushio Shinohara

Ushio Shinohara
篠原 有司男
Born	(1932-01-17) January 17, 1932 (age 89) Kōjimachi, Tokyo, Empire of Japan
Other names	Gyū-chan
Education	Tokyo University of the Arts
Movement	Neo-Dada
Spouse(s)	Noriko Shinohara
Children	3

Ushio Shinohara (篠原 有司男, Shinohara Ushio, born January 17, 1932), nicknamed “Gyū-chan”, is a Japanese Neo-Dadaist artist.^[1] His bright, large 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, Leo Castelli Gallery, New York, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles and The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Seoul,^[2] and others. Shinohara and his wife, Noriko, are the subjects of a documentary film by Zachary Heinzerling called Cutie and the Boxer (2013).^[3]

Early life and education[]

Ushio Shinohara was born on January 17, 1932 in the Kōjimachi neighborhood of central Tokyo.^[4] His father was a tanka poet who was taught by Wakayama Bokusui,^[5] and his mother was a Nihonga painter doll-maker^[6] who had studied at the Private Women's School of Fine Arts (present-day Joshibi University of Art and Design) in Tokyo.

In 1952 Shinohara entered the Tokyo Art University (later renamed to Tokyo University of the Arts), where he studied oil painting under the renowned painter Takeshi Hayashi.^[4] However, Shinohara quit the school in 1957 without completing his degree.^[1][4]

Career[]

Neo-Dada Organizers[]

In the late 1950s, Shinohara began submitting artworks to the raucous and non-ideological Yomiuri Indépendant Exhibition. 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."^[7]

In 1960, Shinohara joined forces with several other artists who had been displaying artworks at the Yomiuri Indépendant, including Genpei Akasegawa, Shūsaku Arakawa, and Masunobu Yoshimura, to form the short lived artistic collective "Neo-Dada Organizers." 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.^[8] 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.^[9]

Shinohara was instrumental in shaping the group's orientation around what Akasegawa would later term "creative destruction."^[10] In June 1960, at the height of the Anpo protests, Shinohara penned the short statement the group deemed its "manifesto," writing as follows:

No matter how much we fantasize about procreation in the year 1960, a single atomic explosion will casually solve everything for us, so Picasso’s fighting bulls no longer move us any more than the spray of blood from a run-over stray cat. As we enter the blood-soaked ring in this 20.6th century—a century which has trampled on sincere works of art—the only way to avoid being butchered is to become butchers ourselves.^[10]

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.^[11] In 1961, renowned photographer William Klein captured Shinohara's "boxing painting" on film, publishing the photos in his famed 1964 collection Tokyo.^[12]

Post Neo-Dada[]

In 1965, Shinohara began his most successful series of artworks, called Oira.^[13] An oiran was a high-ranking courtesan in Japan's historical Edo period (1600-1868). Breaking with traditional Edo period depictions of the oiran's great beauty, Shinohara depicted the oiran as hideously ugly and colored them with garish fluorescent paint inspired by pop art.^{[citation needed]} The Oiran series represented a backlash to or rejection of what society believed to be beautiful.^{[citation needed]} For the Oiran series, Shinohara was awarded a prize by the William and Norma Copley Foundation.^{[citation needed]}

New York[]

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In 1969, Shinohara relocated to New York City, originally on a one-year scholarship from the John D. Rockefeller III Fund.^[12] To visit New York was Shinohara’s dream; he left with the intention of staying in New York for a short period to work and create new ideas because of the different surroundings.^{[citation needed]} However, he came to love the city's spirit and the mix of ethnicities so much he decided not to return to Japan.^{[citation needed]}

In New York he loved being a tourist and getting inspiration from anything and anyone he ran into.^{[citation needed]} He kept with the concept of reinventing American art such as comics and Neo-Dada works.^{[citation needed]} He remained fixed on the freedom of America.^{[citation needed]} He knew very few people in America and his English was poor, but because of these hardships his work excelled.^{[citation needed]} It was easier for him to express his ideas because of all his new experiences.^{[citation needed]}

Around 1970, Shinohara began his series Motorcycle Sculptures.^[13] In his mind, motorcycles represented America.^{[citation needed]} He created these works out of discarded objects — primarily scraps of cardboard he washed and soaked in water to make them pliant, shaping them almost like papier-mâché.^{[citation needed]} They were rough, vigorous sculptures.^{[citation needed]} The motorcycles were reminiscent of what America meant to him, but many times these sculptures had geishas riding on the back seat.^{[citation needed]} The sculptures were painted in shades of green, pink and red which paralleled the colors of street fairs in Tokyo.^{[citation needed]} They were full of detail, very carefully composed, and extremely large.^{[citation needed]} Shinohara wanted these pieces to have a great effect on the viewer and sought to accomplish that with the composition, vivid colors and the scale of the work.^{[citation needed]}

Around 1990, he returned to boxing-painting once more using a huge piece of paper and boxing gloves dipped into neon paint.^[14] This art was soon turned into a performance. He turned these performances into "battles" where he battles against other artists before a crowd, usually in New York.^{[citation needed]}

Shinohara, similar to many action painting-oriented artists of the 1950s and 1960s, cared more for the gesture and vitality and less for the beauty of the image. As Julia Cassim observed in her 1993 review of Shinohara's retrospective at Tsukashin Hall in Amagasaki, Japan:

“His kaleidoscopic paintings of pneumatic, rubber-nippled nudes, bikers and Coney Island’s garish glories are painted in the acid reds, greens and pinks common to Asian street fairs from Tokyo to Bombay. They burst at the seams with detail. Seemingly slapdash and rapidly painted, they are, in fact, as carefully composed as any more formal work.”^[15]

Personal life[]

Shinohara is affectionately nicknamed Gyū-chan (ギューチャン, "Little Cow") because his birth name (牛男, also pronounced "Ushio") used the Chinese characters for "cow" and "man."

Shinohara has been married to artist Noriko Shinohara since the early 1970s, together they have a son who is also an artist, .^[12][16][17] Their tumultuous life together as a family was subject to the Zachary Heinzerling directed, 2013 documentary, Cutie and the Boxer.^[12][18] The family is based in the Dumbo neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York.^[19][17] Ushio Shinohara had a previous marriage in Japan and has two children from that marriage.^[17]

Exhibitions[]

In 1982, the Japan Society in New York City hosted an exhibition of Shinohara's work, titled "Tokyo Bazooka". It was curator Alexandra Munroe's first project at the museum after having studied Japanese art through the mid-19th century and reportedly inspired her research into modern and contemporary Japanese artists practice, including the 1994 exhibition and catalogue "Japanese Art After 1945: Scream Against the Sky".^[1]

In 1990, Ushio Shinohara's work was part of a traveling exhibition that was sponsored by the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Also, his boxing-painting and motorcycle sculptures were a part of an exhibition at MoMA from September through November 2005. Shinohara's work "Coca-Cola Plan" (1964) was included in "Tokyo 1955–1970: A New Avant-Garde" with ran from November 2012 until February 2013 at the MoMA in New York.^[20]

Collections[]

Shinohara's work is found in multiple public museum collections including: Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) New York,^[21] the Metropolitan Museum of Art,^[22][23] Hara Museum of Contemporary Art,^[24] Hyogo Prefectural Museum of Art with the Yamamura Collection,^[25] and others.

A 1961 photo by William Klein, of Shinohara creating a boxing painting performance is included in the collection at Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.^[26]

Awards[]

• 1969 – John D. Rockefeller III Award Fund^[12]
• 2007 –48th annual Mainichi Art Prize^[12]

References[]

Citations[]

Sources cited[]

• Collins, Brady; Liu, Lyo Heng; Yang, Yang (2013). BODY/VIOLENCE/CITY: The Neo-Dada Art Actions in 1960 Tokyo. Urban Humanities Initiative, UCLA.
• Kapur, Nick (2018). Japan at the Crossroads: Conflict and Compromise after Anpo. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. ISBN 978-0674984424.

External links[]

• Homepage of the artist
• MoMA - The Collection
• Ushio Shinohara (Japanese, 1932) on MutualArt.com
• Ushio Shinohara's Boxing Painting Performances
• Marcello Farabegoli Projects (former Galerie oko - Japanese Contemporary Art)